BLOCK 1 - DARK ENLIGHTENMENT
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 1)
Neo-reactionaries head for the exit
Enlightenment is not only a state, but an event, and a process. As the
designation for an historical episode, concentrated in northern Europe
during the 18th century, it is a leading candidate for the ‘true name’
of modernity, capturing its origin and essence (‘Renaissance’ and
‘Industrial Revolution’ are others). Between ‘enlightenment’ and
‘progressive enlightenment’ there is only an elusive difference, because
illumination takes time – and feeds on itself, because enlightenment is
self-confirming, its revelations ‘self-evident’, and because a
retrograde, or reactionary, ‘dark enlightenment’ amounts almost to
intrinsic contradiction. To become enlightened, in this historical
sense, is to recognize, and then to pursue, a guiding light.
There were ages of darkness, and then enlightenment came. Clearly,
advance has demonstrated itself, offering not only improvement, but also
a model. Furthermore, unlike a renaissance, there is no need for an
enlightenment to recall what was lost, or to emphasize the attractions
of return. The elementary acknowledgement of enlightenment is already
Whig history in miniature.
Once certain enlightened truths have been found self-evident, there can
be no turning back, and conservatism is pre-emptively condemned –
predestined — to paradox. F. A. Hayek, who refused to describe himself
as a conservative, famously settled instead upon the term ‘Old Whig’,
which – like ‘classical liberal’ (or the still more melancholy
‘remnant’) – accepts that progress isn’t what it used to be. What could
an Old Whig be, if not a reactionary progressive? And what on earth is
that?
Of course, plenty of people already think they know what reactionary
modernism looks like, and amidst the current collapse back into the
1930s their concerns are only likely to grow. Basically, it’s what the
‘F’ word is for, at least in its progressive usage. A flight from
democracy under these circumstances conforms so perfectly to
expectations that it eludes specific recognition, appearing merely as an
atavism, or confirmation of dire repetition.
Still, something is happening, and it is – at least in part – something
else. One milestone was the April 2009
discussion
hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri
Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction
and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual
forthrightness. Thiel
summarized
the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are
compatible.”
In August 2011, Michael Lind posted a democratic
riposte
at Salon, digging up some impressively malodorous dirt, and concluding:
The dread of democracy by libertarians and classical liberals is
justified. Libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy.
Most libertarians have made it clear which of the two they prefer.
The only question that remains to be settled is why anyone should
pay attention to libertarians.
Lind and the ‘neo-reactionaries’ seem to be in broad agreement that
democracy is not only (or even) a system, but rather a
vector, with an unmistakable direction. Democracy and
‘progressive democracy’ are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the
expansion of the state. Whilst ‘extreme right wing’ governments have, on
rare occasions, momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies
beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is
overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational
organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the
electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician,
and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits
from the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the
establishment right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has
ineffectively railed against. Increasingly, however, libertarians have
ceased to care whether anyone is ‘pay[ing them] attention’ – they have
been looking for something else entirely: an exit.
It is a structural inevitability that the libertarian voice is drowned
out in democracy, and according to Lind it should be. Ever more
libertarians are likely to agree. ‘Voice’ is democracy itself, in its
historically dominant, Rousseauistic strain. It models the state as a
representation of popular will, and making oneself heard means more
politics. If voting as the mass self-expression of politically empowered
peoples is a nightmare engulfing the world, adding to the hubbub doesn’t
help. Even more than Equality-vs-Liberty, Voice-vs-Exit is the rising
alternative, and libertarians are opting for voiceless flight. Patri
Friedman
remarks: “we think
that
free exit is so important that we’ve called it the
only Universal Human Right.”
For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it
is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The
subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably
Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of
any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. Predisposed, in any
case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling
irrational mob, it conceives the dynamics of democratization as
fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and
exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they
reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social
corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound
together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side
drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing
cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.
Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark
enlightenment sees appetites. It accepts that governments are made out
of people, and that they will eat well. Setting its expectations as low
as reasonably possible, it seeks only to spare civilization from
frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch. From Thomas Hobbes to
Hans-Hermann Hoppe and beyond, it asks: How can the sovereign power be
prevented – or at least dissuaded — from devouring society? It
consistently finds democratic ‘solutions’ to this problem risible, at
best.
Hoppe advocates an anarcho-capitalist ‘private law society’, but between
monarchy and democracy he does not hesitate (and his
argument
is strictly Hobbesian):
As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the
people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the
monopolistic exploitation of this "property."
Under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not
disappear. Rather, what happens is this: instead of a king and a
nobility who regard the country as their private property, a
temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic
charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but
as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his
protégés’ advantage. He owns its current use – usufruct– but not its capital stock. This does not
eliminate exploitation.
To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried
out with little or no regard to the capital stock. Exploitation
becomes shortsighted and capital consumption will be systematically
promoted.
Political agents invested with transient authority by multi-party
democratic systems have an overwhelming (and demonstrably irresistible)
incentive to plunder society with the greatest possible rapidity and
comprehensiveness. Anything they neglect to steal – or ‘leave on the
table’ – is likely to be inherited by political successors who are not
only unconnected, but actually opposed, and who can therefore be
expected to utilize all available resources to the detriment of their
foes. Whatever is left behind becomes a weapon in your enemy’s hand.
Best, then, to destroy what cannot be stolen. From the perspective of a
democratic politician, any type of social good that is neither directly
appropriable nor attributable to (their own) partisan policy is sheer
waste, and counts for nothing, whilst even the most grievous social
misfortune – so long as it can be assigned to a prior administration or
postponed until a subsequent one – figures in rational calculations as
an obvious blessing. The long-range techno-economic improvements and
associated accumulation of cultural capital that constituted social
progress in its old (Whig) sense are in nobody’s political interest.
Once democracy flourishes, they face the immediate threat of extinction.
Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing
time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to
the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact
accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy,
is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could
be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or
zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic
virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and
attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial
investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial
incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow
might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.
Winston Churchill, who remarked in neo-reactionary style that “the best
argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the
average voter“ is better known for suggesting “that democracy is the
worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”
Whilst never exactly conceding that “OK, democracy sucks (in fact, it
really sucks), but what’s the alternative?” the implication is
obvious. The general tenor of this sensibility is attractive to modern
conservatives, because it resonates with their wry, disillusioned
acceptance of relentless civilizational deterioration, and with the
associated intellectual apprehension of capitalism as an unappetizing
but ineliminable default social arrangement, which remains after all
catastrophic or merely impractical alternatives have been discarded. The
market economy, on this understanding, is no more than a spontaneous
survival strategy that stitches itself together amidst the ruins of a
politically devastated world. Things will probably just get worse
forever. So it goes.
So, what is the alternative? (There’s certainly no point trawling
through the 1930s for one.) “Can you imagine a 21st-century
post-demotist society? One that saw itself as recovering from democracy,
much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism?” asks
supreme Sith Lord of the neo-reactionaries,
Mencius Moldbug. “Well, I suppose
that
makes one of us.”
Moldbug’s formative influences are Austro-libertarian, but that’s all
over. As he explains:
… libertarians cannot present a realistic picture of a world in
which their battle gets won and stays won. They wind up looking for
ways to push a world in which the State’s natural downhill path is
to grow, back up the hill. This prospect is Sisyphean, and it’s
understandable why it attracts so few supporters.
His awakening into neo-reaction comes with the (Hobbesian) recognition
that sovereignty cannot be eliminated, caged, or controlled.
Anarcho-capitalist utopias can never condense out of science fiction,
divided powers flow back together like a shattered Terminator, and
constitutions have exactly as much real authority as a sovereign
interpretative power allows them to have. The state isn’t going anywhere
because — to those who run it — it’s worth far too much to give up, and
as the concentrated instantiation of sovereignty in society, nobody can
make it do anything. If the state cannot be eliminated, Moldbug argues,
at least it can be cured of democracy (or systematic and
degenerative bad government), and the way to do that is to
formalize it. This is an approach he calls ‘neo-cameralism’.
To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A
state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing
logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a
precise fraction of the state’s profit. (A well-run state is very
profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a
board, which hires and fires managers.
This business’s customers are its residents. A profitably-managed
neocameralist state will, like any business, serve its customers
efficiently and effectively. Misgovernment equals mismanagement.
Firstly, it is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state
‘belongs’ to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out
the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental
lies about mass enfranchisement. Unless ownership of the state is
formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers, the
neo-cameral transition will simply not take place, power will remain in
the shadows, and the democratic farce will continue.
So, secondly, the ruling class must be plausibly identified. It should
be noted immediately, in contradistinction to Marxist principles of
social analysis, that this is not the ‘capitalist bourgeoisie’.
Logically, it cannot be. The power of the business class is already
clearly formalized, in monetary terms, so the identification of capital
with political power is perfectly redundant. It is necessary to ask,
rather, who do capitalists pay for political favors, how much
these favors are potentially worth, and how the authority to grant them
is distributed. This requires, with a minimum of moral irritation, that
the entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly
mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and
academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible
shares. Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need to
entirely exclude them from this calculation, although their portion of
sovereignty will be estimated with appropriate derision. The conclusion
of this exercise is the mapping of a ruling entity that is the truly
dominant instance of the democratic polity. Moldbug calls it
the Cathedral.
The formalization of political powers, thirdly, allows for the
possibility of effective government. Once the universe of democratic
corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in
gov-corp. the owners of the state can initiate rational
corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with
any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as
the maximization of long-term shareholder value. There is no longer any
need for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics
whatsoever. In fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal
proclivities. If gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for
its taxes (sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service
function, and if necessary take their custom elsewhere.
Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient,
attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to
draw customers. No voice, free exit.
… although the full neocameralist approach has never been tried,
its closest historical equivalents to this approach are the
18th-century tradition of enlightened absolutism as represented by
Frederick the Great, and the 21st-century nondemocratic tradition as
seen in lost fragments of the British Empire such as Hong Kong,
Singapore and Dubai. These states appear to provide a very high
quality of service to their citizens, with no meaningful democracy
at all. They have minimal crime and high levels of personal and
economic freedom. They tend to be quite prosperous. They are weak
only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by
definition when government is stable and effective.
In European classical antiquity, democracy was recognized as a familiar
phase of cyclical political development, fundamentally decadent in
nature, and preliminary to a slide into tyranny. Today this classical
understanding is thoroughly lost, and replaced by a global democratic
ideology, entirely lacking in critical self-reflection, that is asserted
not as a credible social-scientific thesis, or even as a spontaneous
popular aspiration, but rather as a religious creed, of a specific,
historically identifiable kind:
… a received tradition I call Universalism, which is a nontheistic
Christian sect. Some other current labels for this same tradition,
more or less synonymous, are progressivism, multiculturalism,
liberalism, humanism, leftism, political correctness, and the like.
… Universalism is the dominant modern branch of Christianity on the
Calvinist line, evolving from the English Dissenter or Puritan
tradition through the Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and Progressive
movements. Its ancestral briar patch also includes a few sideways
sprigs that are important enough to name but whose Christian
ancestry is slightly better concealed, such as Rousseauvian laicism,
Benthamite utilitarianism, Reformed Judaism, Comtean positivism,
German Idealism, Marxist scientific socialism, Sartrean
existentialism, Heideggerian postmodernism, etc, etc, etc. …
Universalism, in my opinion, is best described as a mystery cult of power. … It’s as hard to
imagine
Universalism without the State as
malaria without the mosquito. … The point is that this thing,
whatever you care to call it, is at least two hundred years old and
probably more like five. It’s basically the Reformation itself. …
And just walking up to it and denouncing it as evil is about as
likely to work as suing Shub-Niggurath in small-claims court.
To comprehend the emergence of our contemporary predicament,
characterized by relentless,
totalizing, state
expansion, the proliferation of spurious positive ‘human
rights’ (claims on the resources of others backed by coercive
bureaucracies), politicized money, reckless evangelical ‘wars
for democracy’, and comprehensive thought control arrayed in defense of
universalistic dogma (accompanied by the degradation of science into a
government public relations function), it is necessary to ask how
Massachusetts came to conquer the world, as Moldbug does. With every
year that passes, the international ideal of sound governance finds
itself approximating more closely and rigidly to the standards set by
the Grievance Studies departments of New England universities. This is
the divine providence of the ranters and levelers, elevated to a
planetary teleology, and consolidated as the reign of
the Cathedral.
The Cathedral has substituted its gospel for everything we ever knew.
Consider just the concerns expressed by America’s founding fathers
(compiled by ‘Liberty-clinger’, comment #1,
here):
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people
may take away the rights of the other 49%. — Thomas Jefferson
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for
lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!— Benjamin Franklin
Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders
itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit
suicide. — John Adams
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention;
have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the
rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives
as they have been violent in their death. — James Madison
We are a Republican Government, Real liberty is never found in
despotism or in the extremes of democracy…it has been observed that
a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect
government. Experience has proved that no position is more false
than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves
deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their
very character was tyranny…— Alexander Hamilton
More on voting with your feet (and the incandescent genius of Moldbug),
next …
Added Note (March 7):
Don’t trust the attribution of the ‘Benjamin Franklin’ quote, above.
According to
Barry Popik, the saying was probably invented by James Bovard, in 1992. (Bovard
remarks
elsewhere: “There are few more dangerous errors in political thinking than to
equate democracy with liberty.”)
March 2, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 2)
The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie
apocalypse
David Graeber:
It strikes me that if one is going to pursue this to its logical
conclusion, the only way to have a genuinely democratic society
would also be to abolish capitalism in this state.
Marina Sitrin:
We can’t have democracy with capitalism… Democracy and capitalism
don’t work together.
(Here, via
John
J.
Miller)
That’s always the trouble with history. It always looks like it’s
over. But it never is.
(Mencius Moldbug)
Googling ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ together is highly enlightening, in a
dark way. In cyberspace, at least, it is clear that only a distinct
minority think of these terms as positively coupled. If opinion is to be
judged in terms of the Google spider and its digital prey, by far the
most prevalent association is disjunctive, or antagonistic, drawing upon
the reactionary insight that democracy poses a lethal menace to liberty,
all but ensuring its eventual eradication. Democracy is to liberty as
Gargantua to a pie (“Surely you can see that we love liberty, to the
point of gut-rumbling and salivation …”).
Steve H. Hanke lays out the case authoritatively in his short
essay
On Democracy Versus Liberty, focused upon the American
experience:
Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised to learn
that the word “democracy” does not appear in the Declaration of
Independence (1776) or the Constitution of the United States of
America (1789). They would also be shocked to learn the reason for
the absence of the word democracy in the founding documents of the
U.S.A. Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe,
America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about
democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of
the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths
to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of
the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.
If the Framers of the Constitution did not embrace democracy, what
did they adhere to? To a man, the Framers agreed that the purpose of
government was to secure citizens in John Locke’s trilogy of the
rights to life, liberty and property.
He elaborates:
The Constitution is primarily a structural and procedural document
that itemizes who is to exercise power and how they are to exercise
it. A great deal of stress is placed on the separation of powers and
the checks and balances in the system. These were not a Cartesian
construct or formula aimed at social engineering, but a shield to
protect the people from the government. In short, the Constitution
was designed to govern the government, not the people.
The Bill of Rights establishes the rights of the people against
infringements by the State. The only thing that the citizens can
demand from the State, under the Bill of Rights, is for a trial by a
jury. The rest of the citizens’ rights are protections from the
State. For roughly a century after the Constitution was ratified,
private property, contracts and free internal trade within the
United States were sacred. The scope and scale of the government
remained very constrained. All this was very consistent with what
was understood to be liberty.
As the spirit of reaction digs its Sith-tentacles into the brain, it
becomes difficult to remember how the classical (or non-communist)
progressive narrative could once have made sense. What were people
thinking? What were they expecting from the emerging super-empowered,
populist, cannibalistic state? Wasn’t the eventual calamity entirely
predictable? How was it ever possible to be a Whig?
The ideological credibility of radical democratization is not, of
course, in question. As thinkers ranging from (Christian progressive)
Walter Russell Mead to (atheistic reactionary) Mencius Moldbug have
exhaustively detailed, it conforms so exactly to ultra-protestant
religious enthusiasm that its power to animate the revolutionary soul
should surprise nobody. Within just a few years of Martin Luther’s
challenge to the papal establishment, peasant insurrectionists were
stringing up their class enemies all over Germany.
The empirical credibility of democratic advancement is far more
perplexing, and also genuinely complex (which is to say controversial,
or more precisely, worthy of a data-based, rigorously-argued
controversy). In part, that is because the modern configuration of
democracy emerges within the sweep of a far broader modernistic trend,
whose techno-scientific, economic, social and political strands are
obscurely interrelated, knitted together by misleading correlations, and
subsequent false causalities. If, as Schumpeter argues, industrial
capitalism tends to engender a democratic-bureaucratic culture that
concludes in stagnation, it might nevertheless seem as though democracy
was ‘associated’ with material progress. It is easy to misconstrue a
lagging indicator as a positive causal factor, especially when
ideological zeal lends its bias to the misapprehension. In similar vein,
since cancer only afflicts living beings, it might – with apparent
reason — be associated with vitality.
Robin Hanson (gently)
notes:
Yes many trends have been positive for a century or so, and yes
this suggests they will continue to rise for a century or so. But no
this does not mean that students are empirically or morally wrong
for thinking it “utopian fantasy” that one could “end poverty,
disease, tyranny, and war” by joining a modern-day Kennedy’s
political quest. Why? Because positive recent trends in these areas
were not much caused
by such political movements! They were mostly caused by our getting
rich from the industrial revolution, an event that political
movements tended, if anything, to try to hold back on average.
Simple historical chronology suggests that industrialization supports
progressive democratization, rather than being derived from it. This
observation has even given rise to a widely accepted school of pop
social science theorizing, according to which the ‘maturation’ of
societies in a democratic direction is determined by thresholds of
affluence, or middle-class formation. The strict logical correlate of
such ideas, that democracy is fundamentally non-productive in
relation to material progress, is typically under-emphasized. Democracy
consumes progress. When perceived from the perspective of the
dark enlightenment, the appropriate mode of analysis for studying the
democratic phenomenon is general parasitology.
Quasi-libertarian responses to the outbreak accept this implicitly.
Given a population deeply infected by the zombie virus and shambling
into cannibalistic social collapse, the preferred option is quarantine.
It is not communicative isolation that is essential, but a functional
dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops and exposes
people with maximum intensity to the consequences of their own actions.
Social solidarity, in precise contrast, is the parasite’s friend. By
cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market
signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass
through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized
society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local,
painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected
behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political
pathologies.
Gnaw off other people’s body parts and it might be hard to get a
job– that’s the kind of lesson a tight-feedback, cybernetically intense,
laissez faire order would allow to be learned. It’s also
exactly the kind of insensitive zombiphobic discrimination that any
compassionate democracy would denounce as thought crime, whilst boosting
the public budget for the vitally-challenged, undertaking consciousness
raising campaigns on behalf of those suffering from involuntary
cannibalistic impulse syndrome, affirming the dignity of the zombie
lifestyle in higher-education curriculums, and rigorously regulating
workspaces to ensure that the shuffling undead are not victimized by
profit-obsessed, performance-centric, or even unreconstructed
animationist employers.
As enlightened zombie-tolerance flourishes in the shelter of the
democratic mega-parasite, a small remnant of reactionaries, attentive to
the effects of real incentives, raise the formulaic question: “You do
realize that these policies lead inevitably to a massive expansion of
the zombie population?” The dominant vector of history presupposes that
such nuisance objections are marginalized, ignored, and — wherever
possible – silenced through social ostracism. The remnant either
fortifies the basement, whilst stocking up on dried food, ammunition,
and silver coins, or accelerates the application process for a second
passport, and starts packing its bags.
If all of this seems to be coming unmoored from historical concreteness,
there’s a conveniently topical remedy: a little digressive
channel-hopping over to Greece. As a microcosmic model for the death of
the West, playing out in real time, the Greek story is hypnotic. It
describes a 2,500 year arc that is far from neat, but irresistibly
dramatic, from proto-democracy to accomplished zombie apocalypse. Its
pre-eminent virtue is that it perfectly illustrates the democratic
mechanism in extremis, separating individuals and local
populations from the consequences of their decisions by scrambling their
behavior through large-scale, centralized re-distribution systems. You
decide what you do, but then vote on the consequences. How could anyone
say ‘no’ to that?
No surprise that over 30 years of EU membership Greeks have been eagerly
cooperating with a social-engineering mega-project that strips out all
short-wave social signals and re-routes feedback through the grandiose
circuitry of European solidarity, ensuring that all
economically-relevant information is red-shifted through the heat-death
sump of the
European Central Bank. Most specifically, it has conspired with ‘Europe’ to obliterate
all
information that might be contained in Greek interest rates, thus
effectively disabling all financial feedback on domestic policy choices.
This is democracy in a consummate form that defies further perfection,
since nothing conforms more exactly to the ‘general will’ than the
legislative abolition of reality, and nothing delivers the hemlock to
reality more definitively than the coupling of Teutonic interest rates
with East Mediterranean spending decisions.
Live like Hellenes and pay like Germans — any political party
that failed to rise to power on that platform deserves to scrabble for
vulture-picked scraps in the wilderness. It’s the ultimate
no-brainer, in just about every imaginable sense of that
expression. What could possibly go wrong?
More to the point, what did go wrong? Mencius Moldbug begins his
Unqualified Reservations series
How Dawkins got pwned (or taken over through an “exploitable
vulnerability”) with the
outlining
of design rules for a hypothetical “optimal memetic parasite” that would
be “as virulent as possible. It will be highly contagious, highly
morbid, and highly persistent. A really ugly bug.” In comparison to this
ideological super-plague, the vestigial monotheism derided in
The God Delusion would figure as nothing worse than a
moderately unpleasant head cold. What begins as abstract meme tinkering
concludes as grand-sweep history, in the dark enlightenment
mode:
My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian
atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a
Calvinist
atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other
words,
he can be also described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist
atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.
This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual
ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War.
Except of course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is
a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth
Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter traditions
that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.
Frankly, these dudes were freaks. Maniacal fanatics. Any mainstream
English thinker of the 17th, 18th or 19th century, informed that
this tradition (or its modern descendant) is now the planet’s
dominant Christian denomination, would regard this as a sign of
imminent apocalypse. If you’re sure they’re wrong, you’re more sure
than me.
Fortunately, Cromwell himself was comparatively moderate. The
extreme ultra-Puritan sects never got a solid lock on power under
the Protectorate. Even more fortunately, Cromwell got old and died,
and Cromwellism died with him. Lawful government was restored to
Great Britain, as was the Church of England, and Dissenters became a
marginal fringe again. And frankly, a damned good riddance it
was.
However, you can’t keep a good parasite down. A community of
Puritans fled to America and founded the theocratic colonies of New
England. After its military victories in the American Rebellion and
the War of Secession, American Puritanism was well on the way to
world domination. Its victories in World War I, World War II, and
the Cold War confirmed its global hegemony. All legitimate
mainstream thought on Earth today is descended from the American
Puritans, and through them the English Dissenters.
Given the rise of this “really ugly bug” to world dominion, it might
seem strange to pick on tangential figure such as Dawkins, but Moldbug
selects his target for exquisitely-judged strategic reasons. Moldbug
identifies with Dawkins’ Darwinism, with his intellectual repudiation of
Abrahamic theism, and with his broad commitment to scientific
rationality. Yet he recognizes, crucially, that Dawkins’ critical
faculties shut off – abruptly and often comically – at the point where
they might endanger a still broader commitment to hegemonic
progressivism. In this way, Dawkins is powerfully indicative. Militant
secularism is itself a modernized variant of the Abrahamic meta-meme, on
its Anglo-Protestant, radical democratic taxonomic branch,
whose specific tradition is anti-traditionalism. The clamorous
atheism of The God Delusion represents a protective feint, and
a consistent upgrade of religious reformation, guided by a spirit of
progressive enthusiasm that trumps empiricism and reason, whilst
exemplifying an irritable dogmatism that rivals anything to be found in
earlier God-themed strains.
Dawkins isn’t merely an enlightened modern progressive and implicit
radical democrat, he’s an impressively credentialed scientist, more
specifically a biologist, and (thus) a Darwinian evolutionist. The point
at which he touches the limit of acceptable thinking as defined by the
memetic super-bug is therefore quite easy to anticipate. His inherited
tradition of low-church ultra-protestantism has replaced God with Man as
the locus of spiritual investment, and ‘Man’ has been in the process of
Darwinian research dissolution for over 150 years. (As the sound, decent
person I know you are, having gotten this far with Moldbug you’re
probably already muttering under your breath,
don’t mention race, don’t mention race, don’t mention race, please,
oh please, in the name of the Zeitgeist and the dear sweet non-god of
progress, don’t mention race …) … but Moldbug is
already
citing Dawkins, citing Thomas Huxley “…in a contest which is to be
carried out by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the
hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our
dusky cousins.” Which Dawkins frames by remarking: “Had Huxley… been
born and educated in our time, [he] would have been the first to cringe
with us at [his] Victorian sentiments and unctuous tone. I quote them
only to illustrate how the Zeitgeist moves on.”
It gets worse. Moldbug seems to be holding Huxley’s hand, and … (ewww!)
doing that palm-stroking thing with his finger. This sure ain’t
vanilla-libertarian reaction anymore — it’s getting seriously dark, and
scary. “In all seriousness, what is the evidence for fraternism? Why,
exactly, does Professor Dawkins believe that all neohominids are born
with identical potential for neurological development? He doesn’t say.
Perhaps he thinks it’s obvious.”
Whatever one’s opinion on the respective scientific merits of human
biological diversity or uniformity, it is surely beyond contention that
the latter assumption, alone, is tolerated. Even if
progressive-universalistic beliefs about human nature are true, they are
not held because they are true, or arrived at through any
process that passes the laugh test for critical scientific rationality.
They are received as religious tenets, with all of the passionate
intensity that characterizes essential items of faith, and to question
them is not a matter of scientific inaccuracy, but of what we now call
political incorrectness, and once knew as heresy.
To sustain this transcendent moral posture in relation to
racism is no more rational than subscription to the doctrine of
original sin, of which it is, in any case, the unmistakable
modern substitute. The difference, of course, is that ‘original sin’ is
a traditional doctrine, subscribed to by an embattled social cohort,
significantly under-represented among public intellectuals and media
figures, deeply unfashionable in the dominant world culture, and widely
criticized – if not derided – without any immediate assumption that the
critic is advocating murder, theft, or adultery. To question the status
of racism as the supreme and defining social sin, on the other hand, is
to court universal condemnation from social elites, and to arouse
suspicions of thought crimes that range from pro-slavery
apologetics to genocide fantasies. Racism is
pure or absolute evil, whose proper sphere is the infinite and
the eternal, or the incendiary sinful depths of the hyper-protestant
soul, rather than the mundane confines of civil interaction, social
scientific realism, or efficient and proportional legality. The
dissymmetry of affect, sanction, and raw social power attending old
heresies and their replacements, once noticed, is a nagging indicator. A
new sect reigns, and it is not even especially well hidden.
Yet even among the most hardened HBD constituencies, hysterical
sanctification of plus-good race-think hardly suffices to lend radical
democracy the aura of profound morbidity that Moldbug detects. That
requires a devotional relation to the State.
March 9, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 3)
The previous installment of this series ended with our hero Mencius
Moldbug, up to his waist (or worse) in the mephitic swamp of political
incorrectness, approaching the dark heart of his politico-religious
meditation on How Dawkins Got Pwned. Moldbug has caught Dawkins
in the midst of a symptomatically significant, and excruciatingly
sanctimonious, denunciation of Thomas Huxley’s racist “Victorian
sentiments” – a sermon which concludes with the strange declaration that
he is quoting Huxley’s words, despite their self-evident and wholly
intolerable ghastliness, “only to illustrate how the
Zeitgeist moves on.”
Moldbug
pounces, asking pointedly: “What, exactly, is this Zeitgeist thing?”
It is, indisputably, an extraordinary catch. Here is a thinker
(Dawkins), trained as a biologist, and especially fascinated by the
(disjunctively) twinned topics of naturalistic evolution and Abrahamic
religion, stumbling upon what he apprehends as a one-way trend of
world-historical spiritual development, which he then – emphatically,
but without the slightest appeal to disciplined reason or evidence –
denies has any serious connection to the advance of science, human
biology, or religious tradition. The stammering nonsense that results is
a thing of wonder, but for Moldbug it all makes sense:
In fact, Professor Dawkins’ Zeitgeist
is … indistinguishable from … the old Anglo-Calvinist or Puritan
concept of Providence. Perhaps this is a false match. But it’s quite a close one.
Another word for Zeitgeist is Progress. It’s unsurprising that Universalists tend to
believe in Progress– in fact, in a political context, they often call themselves
progressives. Universalism has indeed made quite a bit of progress since [the time of Huxley’s
embarrassing remark in]
1913. But this hardly refutes the proposition that Universalism is
a parasitic tradition. Progress for the tick is not progress for the
dog.
What, exactly, is this Zeitgeist thing? The question bears
repeating. Is it not astounding, to begin with, that when one English
Darwinian reaches for a weapon to club another, the most convenient
cudgel to hand should be a German word — associated with an abstruse
lineage of state-worshipping idealistic philosophy — explicitly
referencing a conception of historical time that has no discernible
connection to the process of naturalistic evolution? It is as if,
scarcely imaginably, during a comparable contention among physicists (on
the topic of quantum indeterminacy), one should suddenly hear it shouted
that “God does not play dice with the universe.” In fact, the two
examples are intimately entangled, since Dawkins’ faith in the
Zeitgeist is combined with adherence to the dogmatic
progressivism of ‘Einsteinian Religion’ (meticulously
dissected, of course, by Moldbug).
The shamelessness is remarkable, or at least it would be, were it
naively believed that the protocols of scientific rationality occupied
sovereign position in such disputation, if only in principle. In fact –
and here irony is amplified to the very brink of howling psychosis –
Einstein’s Old One still reigns. The criteria of judgment owe everything
to neo-puritan spiritual hygiene, and nothing whatsoever to testable
reality. Scientific utterance is screened for conformity to a
progressive social agenda, whose authority seems to be unaffected by its
complete indifference to scientific integrity. It reminds Moldbug of
Lysenko, for understandable reasons.
“If the facts do not agree with the theory, so much worse for the facts”
Hegel asserted. It is the Zeitgeist that is God, historically
incarnated in the state, trampling mere data back into the dirt. By now,
everybody knows where this ends. An egalitarian moral ideal, hardened
into a universal axiom or increasingly incontestable dogma, completes
modernity’s supreme historical irony by making ‘tolerance’ the iron
criterion for the limits of (cultural) toleration. Once it is accepted
universally, or, speaking more practically, by all social forces
wielding significant cultural power, that
intolerance is intolerable, political authority has legitimated
anything and everything convenient to itself, without restraint.
That is the magic of the dialectic, or of logical perversity. When only
tolerance is tolerable, and everyone (who matters) accepts this
manifestly nonsensical formula as not only rationally intelligible, but
as the universally-affirmed principle of modern democratic faith,
nothing except politics remains. Perfect tolerance and absolute
intolerance have become logically indistinguishable, with either equally
interpretable as the other, A = not-A, or the inverse, and in the
nakedly Orwellian world that results, power alone holds the keys of
articulation. Tolerance has progressed to such a degree that it has
become a social police function, providing the existential pretext for
new inquisitional institutions. (“We must remember that those who
tolerate intolerance abuse tolerance itself, and an enemy of tolerance
is an enemy of democracy,” Moldbug
ironizes.)
The spontaneous tolerance that characterized classical liberalism,
rooted in a modest set of strictly negative rights that restricted the
domain of politics, or government intolerance, surrenders during the
democratic surge-tide to a positive right to be tolerated,
defined ever more expansively as substantial entitlement, encompassing
public affirmations of dignity, state-enforced guarantees of equal
treatment by all agents (public and private), government protections
against non-physical slights and humiliations, economic subsidies, and –
ultimately – statistically proportional representation within all fields
of employment, achievement, and recognition. That the eschatological
culmination of this trend is simply impossible matters not at all to the
dialectic. On the contrary, it energizes the political process,
combusting any threat of policy satiation in the fuel of infinite
grievance. “I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep
in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and
pleasant land.” Somewhere before Jerusalem is reached, the inarticulate
pluralism of a free society has been transformed into the assertive
multiculturalism of a soft-totalitarian democracy.
The Jews of 17th century Amsterdam, or the Huguenots of 18th century
London, enjoyed the right to be left alone, and enriched their host
societies in return. The democratically-empowered grievance groups of
later modern times are incited by political leaders to demand a
(fundamentally illiberal) right to be heard, with social
consequences that are predominantly malignant. For politicians, however,
who identify and promote themselves as the voice of the unheard and the
ignored, the self-interest at stake could hardly be more obvious.
Tolerance, which once presupposed neglect, now decries it, and in so
doing becomes its opposite. Were this a partisan development, partisan
politics of a democratic kind might sustain the possibility of
reversion, but it is nothing of the kind. “When someone is hurting,
government has got to move” declared ‘compassionate conservative’ US
President George W. Bush, in a futile effort to channel the Cathedral.
When the ‘right’ sounds like this it is not only dead, but unmistakably
reeking of advanced decomposition. ‘Progress’ has won, but is that bad?
Moldbug
approaches
the question rigorously:
If a tradition causes its hosts to make miscalculations that
compromise their personal goals, it exhibits Misesian morbidity. If
it causes its hosts to act in ways that compromise their genes’
reproductive interests, it exhibits Darwinian morbidity. If
subscribing to the tradition is individually advantageous or neutral
(defectors are rewarded, or at least unpunished) but collectively
harmful, the tradition is parasitic. If subscribing is individually
disadvantageous but collectively beneficial, the tradition is
altruistic. If it is both individually and collectively benign, it
is symbiotic. If it is both individually and collectively harmful,
it is malignant. Each of these labels can be applied to either
Misesian or Darwinian morbidity. A theme that is arational, but does
not exhibit either Misesian or Darwinian morbidity, is trivially
morbid.
Behaviorally considered, the Misesian and Darwinian systems are clusters
of ‘selfish’ incentives, oriented respectively to property accumulation
and gene propagation. Whilst the Darwinians conceive the ‘Misesian’
sphere as a special case of genetically self-interested motivation, the
Austrian tradition, rooted in highly rationalized neo-kantian
anti-naturalism, is pre-disposed to resist such reductionism. Whilst the
ultimate implications of this contest are considerable, under current
conditions it is a squabble of minor urgency, since both formations are
united in ‘hate’, which is to say, in their reactionary tolerance for
incentive structures that punish the maladapted.
‘Hate’ is a word to pause over. It testifies with special clarity to the
religious orthodoxy of the Cathedral, and its peculiarities merit
careful notice. Perhaps its most remarkable feature is its perfect
redundancy, when evaluated from the perspective of any analysis of legal
and cultural norms that is not enflamed by neo-puritan
evangelical enthusiasm. A ‘hate crime’, if it is anything at all, is
just a crime, plus ‘hate’, and what the ‘hate’ adds is telling. To
restrict ourselves, momentarily, to examples of uncontroversial
criminality, one might ask: what is it exactly that
aggravates a murder, or assault, if the motivation is
attributed to ‘hate’? Two factors seem especially prominent, and neither
has any obvious connection to common legal norms.
Firstly, the crime is augmented by a purely ideational, ideological, or
even ‘spiritual’ element, attesting not only to a violation of civilized
conduct, but also to a heretical intention. This facilitates the
complete abstraction of hate from criminality, whereupon it takes the
form of ‘hate-speech’ or simply ‘hate’ (which is always to be contrasted
with the ‘passion’, ‘outrage’, or righteous ‘anger’ represented by
critical, controversial, or merely abusive language directed against
unprotected groups, social categories, or individuals). ‘Hate’ is an
offense against the Cathedral itself, a refusal of its spiritual
guidance, and a mental act of defiance against the manifest religious
destiny of the world.
Secondly, and relatedly, ‘hate’ is deliberately and even strategically
asymmetrical in respect to the equilibrium political polarity of
advanced democratic societies. Between the relentless march of progress
and the ineffective grouching of conservatism it does not vacillate. As
we have seen, only the right can ‘hate’. As the doxological immunity
system of ‘hate’ suppression is consolidated within elite educational
and media systems, the highly selective distribution of protections
ensures that ‘discourse’ – especially empowered discourse – is ratcheted
consistently to the left, which is to say, in the direction of an ever
more comprehensively radicalized Universalism. The morbidity of this
trend is extreme.
Because grievance status is awarded as political compensation for
economic incompetence, it constructs an automatic cultural mechanism
that advocates for dysfunction. The Universalist creed, with its reflex
identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative
to the proposition that the lower one’s situation or status, the more
compelling is one’s claim upon society, the purer and nobler one’s
cause. Temporal failure is the sign of spiritual election
(Marxo-Calvinism), and to dispute any of this is clearly ‘hate’.
This does not compel even the most hard-hearted neo-reactionary to
suggest, in a caricature of the high Victorian cultural style, that
social disadvantage, as manifested in political violence, criminality,
homelessness, insolvency, and welfare dependency, is a simple index of
moral culpability. In large part – perhaps overwhelmingly large part –
it reflects sheer misfortune. Dim, impulsive, unhealthy, and
unattractive people, reared chaotically in abusive families, and
stranded in broken, crime-wracked communities, have every reason to
curse the gods before themselves. Besides, disaster can strike anyone.
In regards to effective incentive structures, however, none of this is
of the slightest importance. Behavioral reality knows only one iron law:
Whatever is subsidized is promoted. With a necessity no weaker than that
of entropy itself, insofar as social democracy seeks to soften bad
consequences – for major corporations no less than for struggling
individuals or hapless cultures — things get worse. There is no way
around, or beyond this formula, only wishful thinking, and complicity
with degeneration. Of course, this defining reactionary insight is
doomed to inconsequence, since it amounts to the supremely unpalatable
conclusion that every attempt at ‘progressive’ improvement is fated to
reverse itself, ‘perversely’, into horrible failure. No democracy could
accept this, which means that every democracy will fail.
The excited spiral of Misesian-Darwinian degenerative runaway is neatly
captured in the
words
of the world’s fluffiest Beltway libertarian, Megan McArdle, writing in
core Cathedral-mouthpiece The Atlantic:
It is somewhat ironic that the first serious strains caused by
Europe’s changing demographics are showing up in the Continent’s
welfare budgets, because the pension systems themselves may well
have shaped, and limited, Europe’s growth. The 20th century saw
international adoption of social-security systems that promised
defined benefits paid out of future tax revenue—known to pension
experts as “paygo” systems, and to critics as Ponzi schemes. These
systems have greatly eased fears of a destitute old age, but
multiple studies show that as social-security systems become more
generous (and old age more secure), people have fewer children. By
one estimate, 50 to 60 percent of the difference between America’s
(above-replacement) birthrate and Europe’s can be explained by the
latter’s more generous systems. In other words, Europe’s pension
system may have set in motion the very demographic decline that
helped make that system—and some European governments—insolvent.
Despite McArdle’s ridiculous suggestion that the United States of
America has in some way exempted itself from Europe’s mortuary path, the
broad outline of the diagnosis is clear, and increasingly accepted as
commonsensical (although best ignored). According to the rising creed,
welfare attained through progeny and savings is non-universal, and thus
morally-benighted. It should be supplanted, as widely and rapidly as
possible, by universal benefits or ‘positive rights’ distributed
universally to the democratic citizen and thus, inevitably, routed
through the altruistic State. If as a result, due to the irredeemable
political incorrectness of reality, economies and populations should
collapse in concert, at least it will not damage our souls. Oh
democracy! You saccharine-sweet dying idiot, what do you think the
zombie hordes will care for your soul?
Moldbug
comments:
Universalism, in my opinion, is best described as a mystery cult of
power.
It’s a cult of power because one critical stage in its replicative
lifecycle is a little critter called the State. When we look at the
big U’s surface proteins, we notice that most of them can be
explained by its need to capture, retain, and maintain the State,
and direct its powers toward the creation of conditions that favor
the continued replication of Universalism. It’s as hard to imagine
Universalism without the State as malaria without the mosquito.
It’s a mystery cult because it displaces theistic traditions by
replacing metaphysical superstitions with philosophical mysteries,
such as humanity, progress, equality, democracy, justice,
environment, community, peace, etc.
None of these concepts, as defined in orthodox Universalist
doctrine, is even slightly coherent. All can absorb arbitrary mental
energy without producing any rational thought. In this they are best
compared to Plotinian, Talmudic, or Scholastic nonsense.
As a bonus, here’s the Urban Feature guide to the main sequence
of modern political regimes:
Regime (1) Communist Tyranny
Typical Growth: ~0%
Voice / Exit: Low / Low
Cultural climate: Pyschotic utopianism
Life is … hard but ‘fair’
Transition mechanism: Re-discovers markets at economic
degree-zero
Regime (2) Authoritarian Capitalism
Typical Growth: 5-10%
Voice / Exit: Low / High
Cultural climate: Flinty realism
Life is … hard but productive
Transition mechanism: Pressurized by the Cathedral to
democratize
Regime (3) Social Democracy
Typical Growth: 0-3%
Voice / Exit: High / High
Cultural climate: Sanctimonious dishonesty
Life is … soft and unsustainable
Transition mechanism: Can-kicking runs out of road
Regime (4) Zombie Apocalypse
Typical Growth: N/A
Voice / Exit: High (mostly useless screaming) / High
(with fuel, ammo, dried food, precious metal coins)
Cultural climate: Survivalism
Life is … hard-to-impossible
Transition mechanism: Unknown
For all regimes, growth expectations assume moderately competent
population, otherwise go straight to (4)
March 19, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4)
Re-running the race to ruin
Liberals are baffled and infuriated that poor whites vote
Republican, yet voting on tribal grounds is a feature of all
multi-ethnic democracies, whether [in]
Northern Ireland, Lebanon or Iraq. The more a majority becomes a
minority the more tribal its voting becomes, so that increasingly
the Republicans have become the “white party”; making this point
indelicately got Pat Buchanan the sack, but many others make it
too.
Will it happen here [in the UK]? The patterns are not dissimilar. In the 2010 election the
Conservatives won only 16 per cent of the ethnic minority vote,
while Labour won the support of 72 per cent of Bangladeshis, 78 per
cent of African-Caribbeans and 87 per cent of Africans. The Tories
are slightly stronger among British Hindus and Sikhs – mirroring
Republican support among Asian-Americans – who are more likely to be
home-owning professionals and feel less alienated.
The Economist recently asked if the Tories had a “race problem”,
but it may just be that democracy has a race problem.
— Ed West (here)
Without a taste for irony, Mencius Moldbug is all but unendurable, and
certainly unintelligible. Vast structures of historical irony shape his
writings, at times even engulfing them. How otherwise could a proponent
of traditional configurations of social order – a self-proclaimed
Jacobite – compose a body of work that is stubbornly dedicated to
subversion?
Irony is Moldbug’s method, as well as his milieu. This can be seen, most
tellingly, in his chosen name for the usurped enlightenment, the
dominant faith of the modern world: Universalism. This is a word that he
appropriates (and capitalizes) within a reactionary diagnosis whose
entire force lies in its exposure of an exorbitant particularity.
Moldbug turns continually to history (or, more rigorously,
cladistics), to accurately specify that which asserts its own
universal significance whilst ascending to a state of general dominance
that approaches the universal. Under this examination, what counts as
Universal reason, determining the direction and meaning of modernity, is
revealed as the minutely determined branch or sub-species of a cultic
tradition, descended from ‘ranters’, ‘levelers’, and closely related
variants of dissident, ultra-protestant fanaticism, and owing
vanishingly little to the conclusions of logicians.
Ironically, then, the world’s regnant
Universalist democratic-egalitarian faith is a particular or
peculiar cult that has broken out, along identifiable
historical and geographical pathways, with an epidemic virulence that is
disguised as progressive global enlightenment. The route that it has
taken, through England and New England, Reformation and Revolution, is
recorded by an accumulation of traits that provide abundant material for
irony, and for lower varieties of comedy. The unmasking of the modern
‘liberal’ intellectual or ‘open-minded’ media ‘truth-teller’ as a pale,
fervent, narrowly doctrinaire puritan, recognizably descended from the
species of witch-burning zealots, is reliably – and irresistibly –
entertaining.
Yet, as the Cathedral extends and tightens its grip upon everything,
everywhere, in accordance with its divine mandate, the response it
triggers is only atypically humorous. More commonly, when unable to
exact humble compliance, it encounters inarticulate rage, or at least
uncomprehending, smoldering resentment, as befits the imposition of
parochial cultural dogmas, still wrapped in the trappings of a specific,
alien pedigree, even as they earnestly confess to universal rationality.
Consider, for instance, the most famous words of America’s
Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights …” Could it be honestly maintained that to submit, scrupulously
and sincerely, to such ‘self-evident’ truths amounts to anything other
than an act of religious re-confirmation or conversion? Or denied that,
in these words, reason and evidence are explicitly set aside,
to make room for principles of faith? Could anything be less scientific
than such a declaration, or more indifferent to the criteria of
genuinely universal reasoning? How could anybody who was
not already a believer be expected to consent to such
assumptions?
That the founding statement of the democratic-republican creed should be
formulated as a statement of pure (and doctrinally recognizable) faith
is information of sorts, but it is not yet irony. The irony begins with
the fact that among the elites of today’s Cathedral, these words of the
Declaration of Independence (as well as many others) would be found –
almost universally – to be quaintly suggestive at best, perhaps vaguely
embarrassing, and most certainly incapable of supporting literal assent.
Even amongst libertarian-slanted conservatives, a firm commitment to
‘natural rights’ is unlikely to proceed confidently and emphatically to
their divine origination. For modern ‘liberals’, believers in the
rights-bestowing (or entitlement) State, such archaic ideas are not only
absurdly dated, but positively obstructive. For that reason, they are
associated less with revered predecessors than with the retarded,
fundamentalist thinking of political enemies. Sophisticates of the
Cathedral core understand, as Hegel did, that God is no more than deep
government apprehended by infants, and as such a waste of faith (that
bureaucrats could put to better use).
Since the Cathedral has ascended to global supremacy, it no longer has
need for Founding Fathers, who awkwardly recall its parochial ancestry,
and impede its transnational public relations. Rather, it seeks
perpetual re-invigoration through their denigration. The phenomenon of
the ‘New Atheism’, with its transparent progressive affiliations,
attests abundantly to this. Paleo-puritanism must be derided in order
for neo-puritanism to flourish –
the meme is dead, long live the meme!
At the limit of self-parody, neo-puritan parricide takes the form of the
ludicrous ‘War on Christmas’, in which the allies of the Cathedral
sanctify the (radically unthreatened) separation of Church and State
through nuisance agitation against public expressions of traditional
Christian piety, and their ‘Red State’ dupes respond with dyspeptic
outrage on cable TV shows. Like every other war against fuzzy nouns
(whether ‘poverty’, ‘drugs’, or ‘terror’), the outcome is predictably
perverse. If resistance to the War on Christmas is not yet established
as the solid center of Yuletide festivities, it can be confidently
expected to become so in the future. The purposes of the Cathedral are
served nonetheless, through promotion of a synthetic secularism that
separates the progressive faith from its religious foundations, whilst
directing attention away from the ethnically specific, dogmatic creedal
content at its core.
As reactionaries go, traditional Christians are generally considered to
be quite cuddly. Even the most wild-eyed fanatics of the neo-puritan
orthodoxy have trouble getting genuinely excited about them (although
abortion activists get close). For some real red meat, with the nerves
exposed and writhing to jolts of hard stimulation, it makes far more
sense to turn to another discarded and ceremonially abominated block on
the progressive lineage: White Identity Politics, or (the term Moldbug
opts for) ‘white nationalism’.
Just as the ratchet progress of neo-puritan social democracy is
radically facilitated by the orchestrated pillorying of its embryonic
religious forms, so is its trend to consistently neo-fascist political
economy smoothed by the concerted repudiation of a ‘neo-nazi’ (or
paleo-fascist) threat. It is extremely convenient, when constructing
ever more nakedly corporatist or ‘third position’ structures of
state-directed pseudo-capitalism, to be able to divert attention to
angry expressions of white racial paranoia, especially when these are
ornamented by clumsily modified nazi insignia, horned helmets, Leni
Riefenstahl aesthetics, and slogans borrowed freely from
Mein Kampf. In the United States (and thus, with shrinking
time-lag, internationally) the icons of the Ku Klux Klan, from white
bed-sheets, quasi-Masonic titles, and burning crosses, to lynching
ropes, have acquired comparable theatrical value.
Moldbug offers a sanitized white nationalist blog reading list,
consisting of writers who – to varying degrees of success – avoid
immediate reversion to paleo-fascist self-parody. The first step beyond
the boundary of respectable opinion is represented by
Lawrence Auster, a Christian,
anti-Darwinist, and ‘Traditionalist Conservative’ who
defends ‘substantial’ (ethno-racial) national identity and opposes the
liberal master-principle of nondiscrimination. By the time we reach ‘Tanstaafl’, at the ripped
outer
edge of Moldbug’s carefully truncated
spectrum,
we have entered a decaying orbit, spiraling into the great black hole
that is hidden at the dead center of modern political possibility.
Before following the Tanstaafl-types into the crushing abyss where light
dies, there are some preliminary remarks to make about the white
nationalist perspective, and its implications. Even more than the
Christian traditionalists (who, even in their cultural mid-winter, can
bask in the warmth of supernatural endorsement), white identity politics
considers itself besieged. Moderate or measured concern offers
no equilibrium for those who cross the line, and begin to self-identify
in these terms. Instead, the path of involvement demands rapid
acceleration to a state of extreme alarm, or racial panic, conforming to
an analysis focused upon malicious population replacement at the hands
of a government which, in the oft-cited words of Bertolt Brecht, “has
decided to dissolve the people, and to appoint another one.” ‘Whiteness’
(whether conceived biologically, mystically, or both) is associated with
vulnerability, fragility, and persecution. This theme is so basic, and
so multifarious, that it is difficult to adequately address succinctly.
It encompasses everything from criminal predation (especially
racially-charged murders, rapes, and beatings), economic exactions and
inverse discrimination, cultural aggression by hostile academic and
media systems, and ultimately ‘genocide’ – or definitive racial
destruction.
Typically, the prospective annihilation of the white race is attributed
to its own systematic vulnerability, whether due to characteristic
cultural traits (excessive altruism, susceptibility to moral
manipulation, excessive hospitality, trust, universal reciprocity,
guilt, or individualistic disdain for group identity), or more immediate
biological factors (recessive genes supporting fragile Aryan
phenotypes). Whilst it is unlikely that this sense of unique
endangerment is reducible to the chromatic formula ‘White + Color =
Color’, the fundamental structure is of this kind. In its abstract
depiction of non-reciprocal vulnerability, it reflects the ‘one drop
rule’ (and Mendelian recessive / dominant gene combination). It depicts
mixture as essentially anti-white.
Because ‘whiteness’ is a limit (pure absence of color), it slips
smoothly from the biological factuality of the Caucasian sub-species
into metaphysical and mystical ideas. Rather than accumulating genetic
variation, a white race is contaminated or polluted by admixtures that
compromise its defining negativity – to darken it is to destroy it. The
mythological density of these — predominantly subliminal – associations
invests white identity politics with a resilience that frustrates
enlightened efforts at rationalistic denunciation, whilst contradicting
its own paranoid self-representation. It also undermines recent white
nationalist promotions of a racial threat that is strictly comparable to
that facing indigenous peoples, universally, and depicting whites as
‘natives’ cruelly deprived of equal protection against extinction. There
is no route back to tribal innocence, or flat, biological diversity.
Whiteness has been compacted indissolubly with ideology, whichever the
road taken.
“If Blacks can have it, and Hispanics can have it, and Jews can have it,
why can’t we have it?” – That’s the final building block of white
nationalist grievance, the werewolf curse that means it can only ever be
a monster. There’s exactly one way out for persecuted palefaces, and it
leads straight into a black hole. We promised to get back to Tanstaafl,
and
here
we are, in late Summer 2007, shortly after he got ‘the
Jew
thing’. There isn’t anything very original about his epiphany, which is
exactly the point. He quotes himself:
Isn’t it absurd that anyone would even think to blame Christianity
or WASPs for the rise of PC and its catastrophic consequences? Isn’t
this in fact a reversal of the truth? Hasn’t the rise and spread of
PC eroded the power of Christianity, WASPs, and whites in general?
Blaming them is in effect blaming the victim.
Yes, there are Christians, WASPs, and whites who have fallen for
the PC brainwashing. Yes, there are some who have taken it so deeply
to heart that they work to expand and protect it. That’s the nature
of PC. That is its purpose. To control the minds of the people it
seeks to destroy. The left, at its root, is all about
destruction.
You don’t have to be an anti-Semite to notice where these ideas
originate from and who benefits. But you do have to violate PC to
say: Jews.
That’s the labyrinth, the trap, with its pitifully constricted,
stereotypical circuit. “Why can’t we be cuddly racial preservationists,
like Amazonian Indians? How come we always turn into Neo-Nazis? It’s
some kind of conspiracy, which means it has to be the Jews.”
Since the mid-20th century, the political intensity of the globalized
world has streamed, almost exclusively, out of the cratered ash-pile of
the Third Reich. Until you get the pattern, it seems mysterious that
there’s no getting away from it. After listing some blogs falling under
the relatively genteel category of ‘white nationalism’, Moldbug
cautions:
The Internet is also home to many out-and-out racist blogs. Most
are simply unreadable. But some are hosted by relatively capable
writers … On these racist blogs you’ll find racial epithets,
anti-Semitism (see
why I am not an anti-Semite) and the like. Obviously, I cannot
recommend any of these
blogs,
and nor will I link to them. However, if you are interested in the
mind of the modern racist, Google will get you there.
Google is overkill. A little link-trawling will get you there. It’s a
‘six degrees of separation’ problem (and more like two, or less). Start
digging into the actually existing ‘reactosphere’, and things get quite
astoundingly ugly very quickly. Yes, there really is ‘hate’, panic, and
disgust, as well as a morbidly addictive abundance of very grim,
vitriolic wit, and a disconcertingly impressive weight of credible fact
(these guys just love statistics to death). Most of all, just
beyond the horizon, there’s the black hole. If reaction ever became a
popular movement, its few slender threads of bourgeois (or perhaps
dreamily ‘aristocratic’) civility wouldn’t hold back the beast for long.
As liberal decency has severed itself from intellectual integrity, and
exiled harsh truths, these truths have found new allies, and become
considerably harsher. The outcome is mechanically, and monotonously,
predictable. Every liberal democratic ‘cause war’ strengthens and
feralizes what it fights. The war on poverty creates a chronically
dysfunctional underclass. The war on drugs creates crystallized
super-drugs and mega-mafias. Guess what? The war on political
incorrectness creates data-empowered, web-coordinated, paranoid and
poly-conspiratorial werewolves, superbly positioned to take advantage of
liberal democracy’s impending rendezvous with ruinous reality, and to
then play their part in the unleashing of unpleasantnesses that are
scarcely imaginable (except by disturbing historical analogy). When a
sane, pragmatic, and fact-based negotiation of human differences is
forbidden by ideological fiat, the alternative is not a reign of perpetual peace, but a
festering of
increasingly self-conscious and militantantly defiant
thoughtcrime, nourished by publicly unavowable realities, and
energized by powerful, atavistic, and palpably dissident mythologies.
That’s obvious, on the ‘Net.
Moldbug considers the danger of white nationalism to be both over- and
understated. On the one hand, the ‘menace’ is simply ridiculous, and
merely reflects neo-puritan spiritual dogma in its most hysterically
oppressive and stubbornly mindless form. “It should be obvious that,
although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the
stuff,” Moldbug remarks, before describing it as “the most marginalized
and socially excluded belief system in the history of the world … an
obnoxious social irritant in any circle which does not include tattooed
speedfreak bikers.”
Yet the danger remains, or rather, is under construction.
I can imagine one possibility which might make white nationalism
genuinely dangerous. White nationalism would be dangerous if there
was some issue on which white nationalists were right, and everyone
else was wrong. Truth is always dangerous. Contrary to common
belief, it does not always prevail. But it’s always a bad idea to
turn your back on it. …While the evidence for human cognitive
biodiversity is indeed debatable, what’s not debatable is that it is
debatable …[even though]
everyone who is not a white nationalist has spent the last 50 years
informing us that it is not debatable …
There’s far more to Moldbug’s essay, as there always is. Eventually it
explains why he rejects white nationalism, on grounds that owe nothing
to conventional reflexes. But the dark heart of the essay, lifting it
beyond brilliance to the brink of genius, is found early on, at the edge
of a black hole:
Why does white nationalism strike us as evil? Because Hitler was a
white nationalist, and Hitler was evil. Neither of these statements
is remotely controvertible. There is exactly one degree of
separation between white nationalism and evil. And that degree is
Hitler. Let me repeat: Hitler.
The argument seems watertight. (Hitlertight?) But it holds no water
at all.
Why does socialism strike us as evil? Because Stalin was a
socialist, and Stalin was evil. Anyone who wants to seriously argue
that Stalin was less evil than Hitler has an awful long row to hoe.
Not only did Stalin order more murders, his murder machine had its
heyday in peacetime, whereas Hitler’s can at least be seen as a war
crime against enemy civilians. Whether this makes a difference can
be debated, but if it does it puts Stalin on top.
And yet I have never had or seen anything like the “red flags”
response to socialism [“the sense of the presence of evil”]. If I saw a crowd of young,
fashionable
people lining up at the
box office for a hagiographic biopic on Reinhard Heydrich, chills
would run up and down my neck. For Ernesto Guevara, I have no
emotional response. Perhaps I think it’s stupid and sad. I do think
it’s stupid and sad. But it doesn’t freak me out.
Any attempt to be nuanced, balanced, or proportional in the moral case
against Hitler is to entirely misconstrue the nature of the phenomenon.
This can be noted, quite regularly, in Asian societies, for instance,
because the ghost of the Third Reich does not occupy central position in
their history, or rather, their religion, although – as the
inner sanctum of the Cathedral — it is determined to (and shows almost
every sign of succeeding). A brief digression on cross-cultural
misunderstanding and reciprocal blindness might be merited at this
point. When Westerners pay attention to the ‘God-Emperor’ style of
political devotion that has accompanied modern totalitarianism in East
Asia, the conclusion typically drawn is that this pattern of political
feeling is exotically alien, morbidly amusing, and ultimately –
chillingly — incomprehensible. Contemporary comparisons with laughably
non-numinous Western democratic leaders only deepen the confusion, as do
clumsy quasi-Marxist references to ‘feudal’ sensibilities (as if
absolute monarchy was not an alternative to feudalism, and as
if absolute monarchs were worshipped).
How could a historical and political figure ever be invested with the
transcendent dignity of absolute religious meaning?
It seems absurd …
“Look, I’m not saying that Hitler was a particularly nice guy …” – to
imagine such word is already to see many things. It might even provoke
the question: Does anybody within the (Cathedral’s) globalized world
still think that Adolf Hitler was less evil than the Prince of Darkness
himself? Perhaps only a few scattered paleo-Christians (who stubbornly
insist that Satan is really, really bad), and an even smaller
number of Neo-Nazi ultras (who think Hitler was kind of cool). For
pretty much everybody else, Hitler perfectly personifies
demonic monstrosity, transcending history and politics to attain the
stature of a metaphysical absolute: evil incarnate. Beyond Hitler it is
impossible to go, or think. This is surely interesting, since it
indicates an irruption of the infinite within history – a religious
revelation, of inverted, yet structurally familiar, Abrahamic type.
(‘Holocaust Theology’ already implies as much.)
In this regard, rather than Satan, it might be more helpful to compare
Hitler to the Antichrist, which is to say: to a mirror Messiah, of
reversed moral polarity. There was even an empty tomb.
Hitlerism, neutrally conceived, therefore, is less a pro-Nazi
ideology than a universal faith, speciated within the Abrahamic
super-family, and united in acknowledging the coming of pure evil on
earth. Whilst not exactly worshipped (outside the extraordinarily
disreputable circles already ventured into), Hitler is sacramentally
abhorred, in a way that touches upon theological ‘first things’. If to
embrace Hitler as God is a sign of highly lamentable politico-spiritual
confusion (at best), to recognize his historical singularity and sacred
meaning is near-mandatory, since he is affirmed by all men of sound
faith as the exact complement of the incarnate God (the revealed
anti-Messiah, or Adversary), and this identification has the force of
‘self-evident truth’. (Did anybody ever need to ask why the
reductio ad Hitlerum works?)
Conveniently, like the secularized neo-puritanism that it swallows,
(aversive) Hitlerism can be safely taught in American schools, at a
remarkably high level of religious intensity. Insofar as progressive or
programmatic history continues, this suggests that the Church of Sacred
Hitlerite Abomination will eventually supplant its Abrahamic
predecessors, to become the world’s triumphant ecumenical faith. How
could it not? After all, unlike vanilla deism, this is a faith that
fully reconciles religious enthusiasm with enlightened opinion, equally
adapted, with consummate amphibious capability, to the convulsive
ecstasies of popular ritual and the letter pages of the
New York Times. “Absolute evil once walked amongst us, and
lives still …” How is this not, already, the principal religious message
of our time? All that remains unfinished is the mythological
consolidation, and that has long been underway.
There’s still some bone-fragment picking to do among the ashes and
debris [in Part 5], before turning to healthier things …
April 1, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4a)
A multi-part sub-digression into racial terror
My own sense of the thing is that underneath the happy talk,
underneath the dogged adherence to failed ideas and dead theories,
underneath the shrieking and anathematizing at people like me, there
is a deep and cold despair. In our innermost hearts, we don’t
believe racial harmony can be attained. Hence the trend to
separation. We just want to get on with our lives away from each
other. Yet for a moralistic, optimistic people like Americans, this
despair is unbearable. It’s pushed away somewhere we don’t have to
think about it. When someone forces
us to think about it, we react with fury. That little boy in the
Andersen story about the Emperor’s new clothes? The ending would be
more true to life if he had been lynched by a howling mob of
outraged citizens.
— John Derbyshire,
interviewed
at Gawker
We believe in the equal dignity and presumption of equal decency
toward every person — no matter what race, no matter what science
tells us about comparative intelligence, and no matter what is to be
gleaned from crime statistics. It is important that research be
done, that conclusions not be rigged, and that we are at liberty to
speak frankly about what it tells us. But that is not an argument
for a priori
conclusions about how individual persons ought to be treated in
various situations — or for calculating fear or friendship based on
race alone. To hold or teach otherwise is to prescribe the
disintegration of a pluralistic society, to undermine the aspiration
of E Pluribus Unum.
— Andrew McCarthy,
defending
the expulsion of JD from the National Review
“The Talk” as black Americans and liberals present it (to wit:
necessitated by white malice), is a comic affront — because no one
is allowed (see Barro
above) to notice the context in which black Americans are having run-ins
with the law, each other, and others. The proper context for
understanding this, and the mania that is the Trayvonicus for that
matter, is the reasonable fear of violence. This is the single most exigent fact here — yet you
decree it
must not be spoken.
— Dennis Dale,
responding
to Josh Barro’s call for JD’s ‘firing’
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to
be a slave.
— Bladerunner
There is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very many
other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely, late
at night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with small
children, can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space and time,
at least insofar as the threat of assault is concerned. Whilst this
might not be quite sufficient to define a civilized society, it comes
extremely close. It is certainly necessary to any such
definition. The contrary case is barbarism.
These lucky cities of the western Pacific Rim are typified by
geographical locations and demographic profiles that conspicuously echo
the embarrassingly well-behaved ‘model minorities’ of Occidental
countries. They are (non-obnoxiously) dominated by populations that –
due to biological heredity, deep cultural traditions, or some
inextricable entanglement of the two – find polite, prudent, and pacific
social interactions comparatively effortless, and worthy of continuous
reinforcement. They are also, importantly, open, cosmopolitan societies,
remarkably devoid of chauvinistic boorishness or paranoid
ethno-nationalist sentiment. Their citizens are disinclined to emphasize
their own virtues. On the contrary, they will typically be modest about
their individual and collective attributes and achievements, abnormally
sensitive to their failures and shortcomings, and constantly alert to
opportunities for improvement. Complacency is almost as rare as
delinquency. In these cities an entire — and massively consequential —
dimension of social terror is simply absent.
In much of the Western world, in stark contrast, barbarism has been
normalized. It is considered simply obvious that cities have ‘bad areas’
that are not merely impoverished, but lethally menacing to outsiders and
residents alike. Visitors are warned to stay away, whilst locals do
their best to transform their homes into fortresses, avoid venturing
onto the streets after dark, and – especially if young and male — turn
to criminal gangs for protection, which further degrades the security of
everybody else. Predators control public space, parks are death traps,
aggressive menace is celebrated as ‘attitude’, property acquisition is
for mugs (or muggers), educational aspiration is ridiculed, and
non-criminal business activity is despised as a violation of cultural
norms. Every significant mechanism of socio-cultural pressure, from
interpreted heritage and peer influences to political rhetoric and
economic incentives, is aligned to the deepening of complacent depravity
and the ruthless extirpation of every impulse to self-improvement. Quite
clearly, these are places where civilization has fundamentally
collapsed, and a society that includes them has to some substantial
extent failed.
Within the most influential countries of the English-speaking world, the
disintegration of urban civilization has profoundly shaped the structure
and development of cities. In many cases, the ‘natural’ (one might now
say ‘Asian’) pattern, in which intensive urbanization and corresponding
real estate values are greatest in the downtown core, has been
shattered, or at least deeply deformed. Social disintegration of the
urban center has driven an exodus of the (even moderately) prosperous to
suburban and exurban refuges, producing a grotesque and historically
unprecedented pattern of ‘donut’-style development, with cities
tolerating – or merely accommodating themselves to – ruined and rotting
interiors, where sane people fear to tread. ‘Inner city’ has come to
mean almost exactly the opposite of what an undistorted course of urban
development would produce. This is the geographical expression of a
Western – and especially American – social problem that is at once
basically unmentionable and visible from outer space.
Surprisingly, the core-crashed donut syndrome has a notably insensitive
yet commonly accepted name, which captures it in broad outlines – at
least according to its secondary characteristics – and to a reasonable
degree of statistical approximation: White Flight. This is an
arresting term, for a variety of reasons. It is stamped, first of all,
by the racial bi-polarity that – as a vital archaism –
resonates with America’s chronic social crisis at a number of levels.
Whilst superficially outdated in an age of many-hued multicultural and
immigration issues, it reverts to the undead code inherited from slavery
and segregation, perpetually identified with Faulkner’s words: “The past
is not dead. It isn’t even past.” Yet even in this untypical moment of
racial candor, blackness is elided, and implicitly disconnected from
agency. It is denoted only by allusion, as a residue, concentrated
passively and derivatively by the sifting function of a
highly-adrenalized white panic. What cannot be said is
indicated even as it is unmentioned. A distinctive silence accompanies
the broken, half-expression of a mute tide of racial separatism, driven
by civilizationally disabling terrors and animosities, whose depths, and
structures of reciprocity, remain unavowable.
What the puritan exodus from Old to New World was to the foundation of
Anglophone global modernity, white flight is to its fraying and
dissolution. As with the pre-founding migration, what gives white flight
ineluctable relevance here is its sub-political character:
all exit and no voice. It is the subtle, non-argumentative,
non-demanding ‘other’ of social democracy and its dreams – the
spontaneous impulse of dark enlightenment, as it is initially glimpsed,
at once disillusioning and implacable.
The core-crashed donut is not the only model of sick city syndrome (the
shanty fringe phenomenon emphasized in Mike Davis’
Planet of
Slums
is very different). Nor is donut-disaster urbanism reducible to racial
crisis, at least in its origins. Technological factors have played a
crucial role (most prominently, automobile geography) as have quite
other, long-standing cultural traditions (such as the construction of
suburbia as a bourgeois idyll). Yet all such lineages have been in very
large measure supplanted by, or at least subordinated to, the inherited,
and still emerging, ‘race problem.’
So what is this ‘problem’? How is it developing? Why should anybody
outside America be concerned about it? Why raise the topic now (if
ever)? – If your heart is sinking under the gloomy suspicion this is
going to be huge, meandering, nerve-wracking, and torturous, you’re
right. We’ve got weeks in this chamber of horrors to look
forward to.
The two simplest, quite widely held, and basically incompatible answers
to the first question deserve to be considered as important
parts of the problem.
Question: What is America’s race problem?
Answer-1: Black people.
Answer-2: White people.
The combined popularity of these options is significantly expanded, most
probably to encompass a large majority of all Americans, when is taken
to include those who assume that one of these two answers dominates the
thinking of the other side. Between them, the propositions “The
problem would be over if we could just rid ourselves of black hoodlums /
white racists” and / or “They think we’re all hoodlums / racists and
want to get rid of us” consume an impressive proportion of the political
spectrum, establishing a solid foundation of reciprocal terror and
aversion. When defensive projections are added (“We’re not hoodlums,
you’re racists” or “We’re not racists, you’re hoodlums”), the potential
for super-heated, non-synthesizing dialectics approaches the infinite.
Not that these ‘sides’ are racial (except in black or white
tribal-nationalist fantasy). For crude stereotypes, it is far more useful to turn to the
principal political dimension, and its categories of ‘liberal’
and ‘conservative’ in the contemporary, American sense. To identify
America’s race problem with white racism is the stereotypical
liberal position, whilst identifying it with black social
dysfunction is the exact conservative complement. Although
these stances are formally symmetrical, it is their actual political
asymmentry that charges the American race problem with its
extraordinary historical dynamism and universal significance.
That American whites and blacks – considered crudely as statistical
aggregates — co-exist in a relation of reciprocal fear and perceived
victimization, is attested by the manifest patterns of urban development
and navigation, school choice, gun ownership, policing and
incarceration, and just about every other expression of
revealed (as opposed to stated) preference that is
related to voluntary social distribution and security. An objective
balance of terror reigns, erased from visibility by complementary yet
incompatible perspectives of victimological supremacism and denial. Yet
between the
liberal and conservative positions on race there is no balance
whatsoever, but something closer to a rout. Conservatives are utterly
terrified of the issue, whilst for liberals it is a garden of earthly
delight, whose pleasures transcend the limits of human understanding.
When any political discussion firmly and clearly arrives at the topic of
race, liberalism wins. That is the fundamental law of ideological
effectiveness in the shadow fragrant shade of the Cathedral.
In certain respects, this dynamic political imbalance is even the
primary phenomenon under consideration (and much more needs to be said
about it, down the road).
The regular, excruciating, soul-crushing humiliation of conservatism on
the race issue should come as no surprise to anybody. After all, the
principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated.
That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for. The
essential character of liberalism, as guardian and proponent of
neo-puritan spiritual truth, invests it with supreme mastery over the
dialectic, or invulnerability to contradiction.
That which it is impossible to think must necessarily be embraced,
through faith. Consider only the fundamental doctrine or first article of the
liberal creed, as promulgated through every public discussion, academic
articulation, and legislative initiative relevant to the topic:
Race doesn’t exist, except as a social construct employed by one race
to exploit and oppress another. Merely to entertain it is to shudder before the awesome majesty of
the absolute, where everything is simultaneously its precise opposite,
and reason evaporates ecstatically at the brink of the sublime.
If the world was built out of ideology, this story would already be
over, or at least predictably programmed. Beyond the apparent zig-zag of
the dialectic there is a dominant trend, heading in a single,
unambiguous direction. Yet the liberal-progressive solution to the race
problem – open-endedly escalating, comprehensively systematic,
dynamically paradoxical ‘anti-racism’ – confronts a real obstacle that
is only very partially reflected in conservative attitudes, rhetoric,
and ideology. The real enemy, glacial, inchoate, and non-argumentative,
is ‘white flight’.
At this point, explicit reference to the Derbyshire Case becomes
irresistible. There is a very considerable amount of complex, recent
historical context that cries out for introduction – the cultural
convulsion attending the Trayvon Martin incident in particular – but
there’ll be time for that later (oh yes, I’m afraid so). Derbyshire’s
intervention, and the explosion of words it provoked, while to some
extent illuminated by such context, far exceeds it. That is because the
crucial unspoken term, both in Derbyshire’s now-notorious
short
article,
and also — apparently — in the responses it generated, is ‘white
flight’. By publishing paternal advice to his (Eurasian) children that
has been — not entirely unreasonably — summarized as ‘avoid black
people’, he converted white flight from a much-lamented but seemingly
inexorable fact into an explicit imperative, even a cause.
Don’t argue, flee.
The word Derbyshire emphasizes, in his own penumbra of commentary, and
in antecedent writings, is not ‘flight’ or ‘panic’, but
despair. When asked by blogger Vox Day whether he agreed that
the ‘race card’ had become less intimidating over the past two decades,
Derbyshire
replies:
One [factor], which I’ve written about more than once, I think, in the United
States, is just despair. I am of a certain age, and I was around 50
years ago. I was reading the newspapers and following world events
and I remember the civil rights movement. I was in England, but we
followed it. I remember it, I remember what we felt about it, and
what people were writing about it. It was full of hope. The idea in
everyone’s mind was that if we strike down these unjust laws and we
outlaw all this discrimination, then we’ll be whole. Then America
will be made whole. After an intermediate period of a few years, who
knows, maybe 20 years, with a hand up from things like affirmative
action, black America will just merge into the general population
and the whole thing will just go away. That’s what everybody
believed. Everybody thought that. And it didn’t happen.
Here we are, we’re 50 years later, and we’ve still got these
tremendous disparities in crime rates, educational attainment, and
so on. And I think, although they’re still mouthing the platitudes,
Americans in their hearts feel a kind of cold despair about it. They
feel that Thomas Jefferson was probably right and we can’t live
together in harmony. I think that’s why you see this slow ethnic
disaggregation. We have a very segregated school system now. There
are schools within 10 miles of where I’m sitting that are 98 percent
minority. In residential housing too, it’s the same thing. So I
think there is a cold, dark despair lurking in America’s collective
heart about the whole thing.
This is a version of reality that few want to hear. As Derbyshire
recognizes, Americans are a predominantly Christian, optimistic,
‘can-do’ people, whose ‘collective heart’ is unusually maladapted to an
abandonment of hope. This is a country culturally hard-wired to
interpret despair not merely as error or weakness, but as sin.
Nobody who understands this could be remotely surprised to find bleak
hereditarian fatalism being rejected — typically with vehement hostility
— not only by progressives, but also by the overwhelming majority of
conservatives. At NRO, Andrew C. McCarthy no doubt spoke for many in
remarking:
There is a world of difference, though, between the need to be able
to discuss uncomfortable facts about IQ and incarceration, on the
one hand, and, on the other, to urge race as a rationale for
abandoning basic Christian charity.
Others went much further. At the Examiner, James Gibson
seized
upon “John Derbyshire’s vile racist screed” as the opportunity to teach
a wider lesson – “the danger of conservatism divorced from
Christianity”:
… since Derbyshire does not believe “that Jesus of Nazareth was
divine . . . and that the Resurrection was a real event,”; he cannot
comprehend the great mystery of the Incarnation, whereby the Divine
truly did take on human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and
suffered death at the hands of a fallen humanity in order to redeem
that humanity out of its state of fallenness.
Herein lies the danger of a conservative socio-political philosophy
divorced from a robust Christian faith. It becomes a dead ideology
spawning a view of humanity that is toxic, fatalistic, and (as
Derbyshire proves abundantly) uncharitable.
It was, of course, on the left that the fireworks truly ignited. Elspeth
Reeve at the Atlantic Wire
contended
that Derbyshire had clung on to his relation with the National Review
because he was offering the magazine’s “less enlightened readers” what
they wanted: “dated racial stereotypes.” Like Gibson on the right, she
was keen for people to learn a wider lesson:
don’t think for a minute this stops with Derbyshire. (The
stunningly uncooperative comments thread to her article is worth
noting.)
At Gawker, Louis Peitzman
jumped the shark
(in the approved direction) by describing Derbyshire’s “horrifying
diatribe” as the “most racist article possible,” a judgment that betrays
extreme historical ignorance, a sheltered life, unusual innocence, and a
lack of imagination, as well as making the piece sound far more
interesting than it actually is. Peitzman’s commentators are impeccably
liberal, and of course uniformly, utterly, shatteringly appalled (to the
point of orgasm). Beyond the emoting, Peitzman doesn’t offer much
content, excepting only a little extra emoting – this time mild
satisfaction mixed with residual rage – at the news that Derbyshire’s
punishment has at least begun (“a step in the right direction”) with his
“canning” from the National Review.
Joanna Schroeder (writing
at something called the Good Feed Blog) sought to extend the purge
beyond Derbyshire, to include anybody who had not yet erupted into
sufficiently melodramatic paroxysms of indignation, starting with David
Weigel
at
Slate (who she doesn’t know “in real life, but in reading this piece, it
seems you just might be a racist, pal”). “There are so many … racist,
dehumanizing references to black people in Derbyshire’s article that I
have to just stop myself here before I recount the entire thing point by
point with fuming rage,” she shares. Unlike Peitzman, however, at least
Schroeder has a point – the racial terror dialectic — “… propagating the
idea that we should be afraid of black men, of black people in general,
makes this world dangerous for innocent Americans.”
Your fear makes you scary (although apparently not with
legitimate reciprocity).
As for Weigel, he gets the terror good and hard. Within hours he’s
back
at the keyboard, apologizing for his previous insouciance, and for the
fact he “never ended up saying the obvious: People, the essay was
disgusting.”
So what did Derbyshire actually say, where did it come from, and what
does it mean to American politics (and beyond)? This sub-series will
comb through the spectrum from left to right in search of suggestions,
with socio-geographically manifested ‘white’ panic / despair as a
guiding thread …
Coming next: The Liberal Ecstasy
April 19, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4b)
Obnoxious observations
Although black families and parents of boys aren’t the only ones
who worry about the safety of adolescents, Tillman, Brown and other
parents say raising black boys is perhaps the most stressful aspect
of parenting because they’re dealing with a society that is fearful
and hostile toward them, simply because of the color of their
skin.
“Don’t believe it? Walk a day in my shoes,” Brown said.
Brown said that at 14, his son is at that critical age when he’s
always worried about his safety because of profiling.
“I don’t want to scare him or have him paint people with a broad
brush, but, historically, we black males have been stigmatized as
the purveyors of crime and wherever we are, we’re suspect,” Brown
said.
Black parents who don’t make that fact clear, he and others said,
do it at their sons’ peril.
“Any African-American parent not having that conversation is being
irresponsible,” Brown said. “I see this whole thing as an
opportunity for us to speak frankly, openly and honestly about race
relations.”
— Gracie Bonds Staples (Star-Telegram)
When communities resist an influx of Section 8 housing-voucher
holders from the inner city, say, they are reacting overwhelmingly
to behavior. Skin color is a proxy for that behavior. If inner-city
blacks behaved like Asians — cramming as much knowledge into their
kids as they can possibly fit into their skulls — the lingering
wariness towards lower-income blacks that many Americans
unquestionably harbor would disappear. Are there irredeemable
racists among Americans? To be sure. They come in all colors, and we
should deplore all of them. But the issue of race in the United
States is more complex than polite company is usually allowed to
express.
— Heather Mac Donald (City Journal)
“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK” the
woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated
backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly
in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this
neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George was suspicious of
Trayvon Martin.”
— Chris Francescani (Reuters)
“In brief, dialectics can be defined as the doctrine of the unity of
opposites. This embodies the essence of dialectics,” Lenin
notes,
“but
it requires explanations and development.” That is to say:
further discussion.
The sublimation (Aufhebung) of Marxism into Leninism is an
eventuality that is best grasped crudely. By forging a revolutionary
communist politics of broad application, almost entirely divorced from
the mature material conditions or advanced social contradictions that
had been previously anticipated, Lenin demonstrated that dialectical
tension coincided, exhaustively, with its politicization (and that all
reference to a ‘dialectics of nature’ is no more than retrospective
subordination of the scientific domain to a political model). Dialectics
are as real as they are made to be.
The dialectic begins with political agitation, and extends no further
than its practical, antagonistic, factional and coalitional ‘logic’. It
is the ‘superstructure’ for itself, or against natural
limitation, practically appropriating the political sphere in its
broadest graspable extension as a platform for social domination.
Everywhere that there is argument, there is an unresolved opportunity to
rule.
The Cathedral incarnates these lessons. It has no need to espouse
Leninism, or operational communist dialectics, because it recognizes
nothing else. There is scarcely a fragment of the social
‘superstructure’ that has escaped dialectical reconstruction, through
articulate antagonism, polarization, binary structuring, and reversal.
Within the academy, the media, even the fine arts, political
super-saturation has prevailed, identifying even the most minuscule
elements of apprehension with conflictual ‘social critique’ and
egalitarian teleology. Communism is the universal implication.
More dialectics is more politics, and more politics means ‘progress’ –
or social migration to the left. The production of public agreement only
leads in one direction, and within public disagreement, such impetus
already exists in embryo. It is only in the absence of agreement
and of publicly articulated disagreement, which is to say, in
non-dialectics, non-argument, sub-political diversity, or politically
uncoordinated initiative, that the ‘right-wing’ refuge of ‘the economy’
(and civil society more widely) is to be found.
When no agreement is necessary, or coercively demanded, negative (or
‘libertarian’) liberty is still possible, and this non-argumentative
‘other’ of dialectics is easily formulated (even if, in a free society,
it doesn’t need to be): Do your own thing. Quite clearly, this
irresponsible and negligent imperative is
politically intolerable. It coincides exactly with leftist
depression, retrogression, or depoliticization. Nothing cries out more
urgently to be argued against.
At the opposite extreme lies the dialectical ecstasy of theatrical
justice, in which the argumentative structure of legal proceedings is
coupled with publicization through the media. Dialectical enthusiasm
finds its definitive expression in a courtroom drama that combines
lawyers, journalists, community activists, and other agents of the
revolutionary superstructure in the production of a show trial.
Social contradictions are staged, antagonistic cases articulated, and
resolution institutionally expected. This is Hegel for prime-time
television (and now for the Internet). It is the way that the Cathedral
shares its message with the people.
Sometimes, in its impatient passion for progress, this message can trip
over itself, because even though the agents of the Cathedral are
infinitely reasonable, they are ever less sensible, often
strikingly incompetent, and prone to making mistakes. This is to be
expected on theological grounds. As the state becomes God, it
degenerates into imbecility, on the model of the holy fool. The
media-politics of the Trayvon Martin spectacle provides a pertinent
example.
In the United States, as in any other large country, lots of things
happen every day, exhibiting innumerable patterns of varying obscurity.
For
instance, on an average day,
there
are roughly 3,400 violent crimes, including
40 murders, 230 rapes, 1,000 robberies, and 2,100 aggravated assaults,
alongside 25,000 non-violent property crimes (burglaries and thefts).
Very few of these will be widely publicized, or seized upon as
educational, exemplary, and representative. Even were the media not
inclined towards a narrative-based selection of ‘good stories’, the
sheer volume of incidents would compel something of the kind. Given this
situation, it is all but inevitable that people will ask:
Why are they telling us this?
Almost everything about the death of Trayvon Martin is controversial,
except for media motivation. On that topic there is near unanimity. The
meaning or intended message of the story of the case could scarcely have
been more transparent:
White racist paranoia makes America dangerous for black people.
It would thus rehearse the dialectic of racial terror (your fear is scary), designed – as always — to
convert America’s reciprocal social
nightmare into a unilateral morality play, allocating legitimate dread
exclusively to one side of the country’s principal racial divide. It
seemed perfect. A malignantly deluded white vigilante guns down an
innocent black child, justifying black fear (‘the talk’) whilst exposing
white panic as a murderous psychosis. This is a story of such archetypal
progressive meaning that it cannot be told too many times. In fact, it
was just too good to be true.
It soon became evident, however, that media selection – even when
reinforced by the celebrity / ‘community activist’ rage-machine – hadn’t
sufficed to keep the story on script, and both of the main actors were
drifting from their assigned roles. If progressively-endorsed
stereotypes were to be even remotely preserved, vigorous
editing
would be required. This was especially necessary because certain evil,
racist, bigoted readers of the
Miami Herald
were beginning to forge a narrative-wrecking mental connection between
‘Trayvon Martin’ and ‘burglary tool’.
As for the killer, George Zimmerman, the name said it all. He was
clearly going to be a hulking, pasty-faced, storm-trooper look-alike,
hopefully some kind of Christian gun-nut, and maybe – if they really hit
pay-dirt – a militia movement type with a history of homophobia and
anti-abortion activism. He started off ‘white’ – for no obvious reason
beyond media incompetence and narrative programming – then found himself
transformed into a ‘white Hispanic’ (a category that seems to have been
rapidly innovated on the spot), before gradually shifted through a
series of ever more reality-compliant ethnic complications, culminating
in the discovery of his Afro-Peruvian great grandfather.
In the heart of the Cathedral it was well into head-scratching time.
Here was the great Amerikkkan defendant being prepped for his show
trial, the President had pitched in emotionally on behalf of the sacred
victim, and the coordinated ground game had been advanced to the
simmering brink of race riots, when the message began falling apart, to
such an extent that it now threatened to decay into an annoyingly
irrelevant case of black-on-black violence. It was not only that George
Zimmerman had black ancestry – making him simply ‘black’ by the left’s
own social constructivist standards – he had also grown up amicably
among black people, with two African-American girls as “part of the
household for years,” had entered into joint business venture with a
black partner, he was a registered Democrat, and even some kind of
‘community organizer’ …
So why did Martin die? Was it for carrying iced tea and a bag of
Skittles while black (the media and community activist approved, ‘son
Obama might have had’ version), for scoping out burglary targets (the
Kluxer racial profiling version), or for breaking Zimmerman’s nose,
knocking him over, sitting on top of him, and smashing his head
repeatedly against the sidewalk (to be decided in court)? Was he a
martyr to racial injustice, a low-level social predator, or a human
symptom of American urban crisis? The only thing that was really clear
when legal proceedings began, beyond the squalid sadness of the episode,
was that it was not resolving anything.
For a sense of just how disconcertingly the approved lesson had
disintegrated by the time Zimmerman was charged with second degree
murder, it is only necessary to read
this
post
by HBD-blogger oneSTDV, describing the dialectical derangements of the
race-warrior right:
Despite the disturbing nature of the “charges” against Zimmerman,
many in the alt-right refuse to grant Zimmerman any sympathy or to
even view this as a seminal moment in modern leftism’s
anarcho-tyrannical reign. According to these individuals,
the Spanish-speaking, registered Democrat mestizo got what was
coming to him
— the ire of the black mob and the elite left indirectly buttressed
by Zimmerman himself. Due to his voting record, multicultural
background, and mentoring of minority youth, they see Zimmerman as
emblematic of the left’s assault on white America, a sort of ground
soldier in the campaign against American whiteness. [Bolding in original]
The pop PC police were ready to move on. With the great show trial
collapsing into narrative disorder, it was time to refocus on the
Message, facts be damned (and double damned). ‘Jezebel’ best
exemplifies the hectoring, vaguely hysterical tone:
You know how you can tell that black people are still oppressed?
Because black people are still oppressed. If you claim that you are not a racist person (or, at
least, that
you’re committed to working your ass off not to be one — which is
really the best that any of us can promise), then you must believe
that people are fundamentally born equal. So if that’s true, then in
a vacuum, factors like skin color should have no effect on anyone’s
success. Right? And therefore, if you really believe that all people
are created equal, then when you see that drastic racial
inequalities exist in the real world, the only thing that you could possibly
conclude is that some external force is holding certain people back.
Like…racism. Right? So congratulations! You believe in racism!
Unless you don’t actually think that people are born equal. And if
you don’t believe that people are born equal, then you’re a f*****g racist.
Does anyone “really believe that people are born equal,” in the way it
is understood here? Believe, that is, not only that a formal expectation
of equal treatment is a prerequisite for civilized interaction, but that
any revealed deviation from substantial equality of outcome is an
obvious, unambiguous indication of oppression? That’s “the only thing
you could possibly conclude”?
At the very least, Jezebel should be congratulated for expressing the
progressive faith in its purest form, entirely uncontaminated by
sensitivity to evidence or uncertainty of any kind, casually
contemptuous of any relevant research – whether existent or merely
conceivable – and supremely confident about its own moral invincibility.
If the facts are morally wrong, so much worse for the facts –
that’s the only position that could possibly be adopted, even
if it’s based upon a mixture of wishful thinking, deliberate ignorance,
and insultingly childish lies.
To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to
insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns,
but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t
watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day.
Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity,
is constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender,
ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size and shape, strength, health,
agility, charm, humor, wit, industriousness, and sociability, among
countless other features, traits, abilities, and aspects of their
personality, some immediately and conspicuously, some only slowly, over
time. To absorb even the slightest fraction of all this and to conclude,
in the only way possible, that it is either nothing at all, or
a ‘social construct’ and index of oppression, is sheer Gnostic delirium:
a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good
world veiled by appearances. People are not equal, they do not develop
equally, their goals and achievements are not equal, and nothing can
make them equal. Substantial equality has no relation to reality, except
as its systematic negation. Violence on a genocidal scale is required to
even approximate to a practical egalitarian program, and if anything
less ambitious is attempted, people get around it (some more competently
than others).
To take only the most obvious example, anybody with more than one child
knows that nobody is born equal (monozygotic twins and clones
perhaps excepted). In fact, everybody is born different, in
innumerable ways. Even when – as is normally the case – the implications
of these differences for life outcomes are difficult to confidently
predict, their existence is undeniable, or at least:
sincerely undeniable. Of course sincerity, or even minimal
cognitive coherence, is not remotely the issue here. Jezebel’s position,
whilst impeccable in its political correctness, is not only factually
dubious, but rather laughably absurd, and actually – strictly speaking —
insane. It dogmatizes a denial of reality so extreme that nobody could
genuinely maintain, or even entertain it, let alone plausible explain or
defend it. It is a tenet of faith that cannot be understood, but only
asserted, or submitted to, as madness made law, or authoritarian
religion.
The political commandment of this religion is transparent: Accept
progressive social policy as the only possible solution to the
sin problem of inequality. This commandment is a ‘categorical
imperative’ – no possible fact could ever undermine, complicate, or
revise it. If progressive social policy actually results in an
exacerbation of the problem, ‘fallen’ reality is to blame, since the
social malady is obviously worse than had been originally
envisaged, and only redoubled efforts in the same direction can hope to
remedy it. There can be nothing to learn in matters of faith.
Eventually, systematic social collapse teaches the lesson that chronic
failure and incremental deterioration could not communicate. (That’s
macro-scale social Darwinism for dummies, and it’s the way that
civilizations end.)
Due to it’s exceptional correlation with substantial variation in social
outcomes in modern societies, by far the most troublesome dimension of
human bio-diversity is intelligence or general problem solving ability,
quantified as IQ (measuring Spearman’s ‘g’). When ‘statistical common
sense’ or profiling is applied to the proponents of Human Bio-Diversity,
however, another significant trait is rapidly exposed: a remarkably
consistent deficit of agreeableness. Indeed, it is widely
accepted within the accursed ‘community’ itself that most of those
stubborn and awkward enough to educate themselves on the topic of human
biological variation are significantly ‘socially retarded’, with low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration,
resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations. The typical
EQs of this group can be extracted as the approximate square-root of
their IQs. Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow
beings in a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so
advanced as to compel total cosmic disengagement. These traits, which
they themselves consider – on the basis of copious technical information
— to be substantially heritable, have manifest social consequences,
reducing employment opportunities, incomes, and even reproductive
potential. Despite all the free therapeutic advice available in the
progressive environment, this obnoxiousness shows no sign of
diminishing, and might even be intensifying. As Jezebel shows so
clearly, this can only possibly be a sign of structural
oppression. Why can’t obnoxious people get a break?
The history is damning. ‘Sociables’ have always had it in for the
obnoxious, often declining to marry or do business with them, excluding
them from group activities and political office, labeling them with
slurs, ostracizing and avoiding them. ‘Obnoxiousness’ has been
stigmatized and stereotyped in extremely negative terms, to such an
extent that many of the obnoxious have sought out more sensitive labels,
such as ‘socially-challenged’, or ‘differently socially abled’. Not
uncommonly, people have been verbally or even physically assaulted for
no other reason than their radical obnoxiousness. Most tragically of
all, due to their complete inability to get on with one another, the
obnoxious have never been able to politically mobilize against the
structural social oppression they face, or to enter into coalitions with
their natural allies, such as cynics, debunkers, contrarians, and
Tourette Syndrome sufferers. Obnoxiousness has yet to be liberated,
although it’s probable that the Internet will ‘help’ …
Consider John Derbyshire’s essay in infamy
The
Talk:
Nonblack Version, focusing initially on its relentless obnoxiousness, and attentive to
the negative correlation between sociability and objective reason. As
Derbyshire notes elsewhere, people are generally incapable of
differentiating themselves from group identities, or properly applying
statistical generalizations about groups to individual cases, including
their own. A rationally indefensible, but socially inevitable,
reification of group profiles is psychologically normal – even ‘human’ –
with the result that noisy, non-specific, statistical information is
erroneously accepted as a contribution to self-understanding, even when
specific information is available.
From the perspective of socially autistic, low-EQ, rational analysis,
this is simply mistaken. If an individual has certain
characteristics, the fact of belonging to a group that has similar or
dissimilar average characteristics is of no relevance whatsoever. Direct
and determinate information about the individual is not to any degree
enriched by indirect and indeterminate (probabilistic) information about
the groups to which the individual belongs. If an individual’s test
results are known, for instance, no additional insight is provided by
statistical inferences about the test results that
might have been expected based on group profiling. An Ashkenazi
Jewish moron is no less moronic because he is an Ashkenazi Jew. Elderly
Chinese nuns are unlikely to be murderers, but a murderer who happens to
be an elderly Chinese nun is neither more nor less murderous than one
who is not. This is all extremely obvious, to obnoxious people.
To normal people, however, it is not obvious at all. In part this is
because rational intelligence is scarce and abnormal among humans, and
in part because social ‘intelligence’ works with what everyone else is
thinking, which is to say, with irrational groupish sentiment, meager
information, prejudices, stereotypes, and heuristics. Since (almost)
everybody else is taking short-cuts, or ‘economizing’ on reason, it is
only rational to react defensively to generalizations that are likely to
be reified or inappropriately applied — over-riding or substituting for
specific perceptions. Anybody who anticipates being pre-defined through
a group identity has an expanded ego-investment in that group and the
way it is perceived. A generic assessment, however objectively arrived
at, will immediately become personal, under (even quite remotely) normal
conditions.
Obnoxious reason can stubbornly insist that
anything average cannot be about you, but the message will not
be generally received. Human social ‘intelligence’ is not built that
way. Even supposedly sophisticated commentators blunder repeatedly into
the most jarring exhibitions of basic statistical incomprehension
without the slightest embarrassment, because embarrassment was designed
for something else (and for almost exactly the opposite). The failure to
understand stereotypes in their scientific, or probabilistic
application, is a functional prerequisite of sociability, since the sole
alternative to idiocy in this respect is obnoxiousness.
Derbyshire’s article is noteworthy because it succeeds in being
definitively obnoxious, and has been recognized as such,
despite the spluttering incoherence of most rejoinders. Among the things
that ‘the talk’ and ‘the counter-talk’ share is a theatrical structure
of pseudo-private conversation designed to be overheard. In
both cases, a message that parents are compelled to deliver to their
children is staged as the vehicle for a wider social lesson, aimed at
those who, through action or inaction, have created a world that is
intolerably hazardous to them.
This form is intrinsically manipulative, making even the ‘original’ talk
a tempting target of parody. In the original, however, a tone of
anguished sincerity is engineered through a deliberate performance of
innocence (or ignorance).
Listen son, I know this will be difficult to understand … (Oh why, oh why are they doing this to
us?). The counter-talk, in stark contrast, melds its micro-social drama
with the clinically non-sociable discourse of “methodical inquiries in
the human sciences” – treating populations as fuzzy bio-geographical
units with quantifiable characteristics, rather than as legal-political
subjects in communication. It derides innocence, and – by implication –
the criterion of sociability itself. Agreement, agreeableness, count for
nothing. The rigorously and redundantly compiled statistics say what
they say, and if we cannot live with that, so much the worse for us.
Yet even to a reasonably sympathetic, or scrupulously obnoxious,
reading, Derbyshire’s article provides grounds for criticism. For
instance, and from the beginning, it is notable that the racial
reciprocal of “nonblack Americans” is ‘black Americans’, not “American
blacks” (the term Derbyshire selects). This reversal of word order,
switching nouns and adjectives, quickly settles into a pattern. Does it
matter that Derbyshire requests the extension of civility to any
“individual black” (rather than to ‘black individuals’)? It certainly
makes a difference. To say that someone is ‘black’ is to say something
about them, but to say that someone is ‘a black’ is to say who
they are. The effect is subtly, yet distinctly, menacing, and
Derbyshire is too well-trained, algebraically, to be excused from
noticing it. After all, ‘John Derbyshire is a white’ sounds
equally off, as does any analogous formulation, submerging the
individual in the genus, to be retrieved as a mere instance, or example.
The more intellectually substantive aspect of this over-reach into
gratuitous incivility have been examined by
William Saletan
and
Noah Millman, who make very similar points, from the two sides of the
liberal/conservative divide. Both writers identify a fissure or
methodical incongruity in Derbyshire’s article, stemming from its
commitment to the micro-social application of macro-social statistical
generalizations. Stereotypes, however rigorously confirmed, are
essentially inferior to specific knowledge in any concrete
social situation, because nobody ever encounters a population.
As a liberal of
problematic standing, Saletan has no choice but to recoil melodramatically from
Derbyshire’s “stomach-turning conclusions,” but his reasons for doing so
are not consumed by his gastro-emotional crisis. “But what exactly is a
statistical truth?” he asks. “It’s a probability estimate you might fall
back on if you know nothing about [a particular individual]. It’s an
ignorant person’s weak substitute for knowledge.” Derbyshire, with his
Aspergery attention to the absence of black Fields Medal winners, is “…a
math nerd who substitutes statistical intelligence for social
intelligence. He recommends group calculations instead of taking the
trouble to learn about the person standing in front of you.”
Millman emphasizes the ironic reversal that switches (obnoxious) social
scientific knowledge into imperative ignorance:
The “race realists” like to say that they are the ones who are
curious about the world, and the “politically correct” types are the
ones who prefer to ignore ugly reality. But the advice Derbyshire
gives to his children encourages them not
to be too curious about the world around them, for fear of getting
hurt. And, as a general rule, that’s terrible advice for kids – and
not the advice that Derbyshire has followed in his own life.
Millman’s conclusion is also instructive:
So why am I arguing with Derb at all? Well, because he’s a friend.
And because even lazy, socially-irresponsible talk deserves to be
refuted, not merely denounced. Is Derbyshire’s piece racist? Of course it’s racist.
His whole point is that it is both rational and morally right for
his children to treat black people significantly differently from
white people, and to fear them. But “racist” is a descriptive term,
not a moral one. The “race realist” crowd is strongly convinced of
the accuracy of Derbyshire’s major premises, and they are not going
to be argued out of that conviction by the assertion such conviction
is “racist” – nor, honestly, should they be. For that reason, I feel
it’s important to argue that Derbyshire’s conclusions do not follow
simply from those premises, and are, in fact, morally incorrect even
if those premises are granted for the sake of argument.
[Brief intermission …]
May 3, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4c)
The Cracker Factory
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When
the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing
a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This
note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white
men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this
promissory
note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of
honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people
a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient
funds.”
—
Martin Luther King Jr.
Conservatism … is a white people’s movement, a scattering of
outliers notwithstanding.
Always has been, always will be. I have attended at least a hundred
conservative gatherings, conferences, cruises, and jamborees: let me
tell you, there ain’t too many raisins in that bun. I was in and out
of the National Review offices for twelve years, and the only black
person I saw there, other than when Herman Cain came calling, was
Alex, the guy who runs the mail room. (Hey, Alex!)
This isn’t because conservatism is hostile to blacks and mestizos.
Very much the contrary, especially in the case of Conservatism Inc.
They fawn over the occasional nonwhite with a puppyish deference
that fairly fogs the air with embarrassment. (Q: What do you call
the one black guy at a gathering of 1,000 Republicans? A: “Mr.
Chairman.”)
It’s just that conservative ideals like self-sufficiency and minimal
dependence on government have no appeal to underperforming
minorities — groups who, in the statistical generality, are short of
the attributes that make for group success in a modern commercial
nation.
Of what use would it be to them to embrace such ideals? They would
end up even more decisively pooled at the bottom of society than
they are currently.
A much better strategy for them is to ally with as many disaffected
white and Asian subgroups as they can (homosexuals, feminists,
dead-end labor unions), attain electoral majorities, and institute
big redistributionist governments to give them make-work jobs and
transfer wealth to them from successful groups.
Which is what, very rationally and sensibly, they do.
—
John
Derbyshire
Neo-secessionists are all around us… and free speech gives them a
cozy blanket of protection. Rick Perry insinuating Texas could
secede rather than adhere to the federal healthcare law, Todd Palin
belonging to a political association advocating Alaskan secession,
and Sharron Angle talking about ‘second amendment remedies’ to
handle disputes with federal authorities are all examples of
dangerous secessionist rhetoric permeating through modern discourse.
The media focuses our attention at Civil War reenactors and pick-up
trucks with Confederate flags flying on them. But public figures are
influenced as well, by academics who struggle to perpetuate a most
dangerous brand of revisionism.
—
Practically
Historical
African-Americans are the conscience of our country.
—
commenter ‘surfed’
at
Walter Russell Mead’s blog (edited for spelling)
America’s racial ‘original sin’ was foundational, dating back before the
birth of the United States to the clearing of aboriginal peoples by
European settlers, and – still more saliently – to the institution of
chattel slavery. This is the Old Testament history of American
black-white relations, set down in a providential narrative of escape
from bondage, in which factual documentation and moral exhortation are
indissolubly fused. The combination of prolonged and intense social
abuse in a pattern set by the Torah, recapitulating the primordial
moral-political myth of the Western tradition, has installed the story
of slavery and emancipation as the unsurpassable frame of the American
historical experience: let my people go.
‘Practically Historical’ (cited above), quotes Lincoln on the Civil War:
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by
the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall
be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be
paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand
years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are
true and righteous altogether.”
The New Testament of race in America was written in the 1960s, revising
and specifying the template. The combination of the Civil Rights
Movement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Republican
Southern Strategy (appealing to disaffected whites in the states of the
old Confederacy) forged a partisan identification between Blacks and the
Democratic Party that amounted to a liberal-progressive rebirth, setting
the terms for partisan racial polarization that have endured – and even
strengthened – over subsequent decades. For a progressive movement
compromised by a history of systematic eugenicist racism, and a
Democratic Party traditionally aligned with white southern obduracy and
the Ku Klux Klan, the civil rights era presented an opportunity for
atonement, ritual purification, and redemption.
Reciprocally, for American conservatism (and its increasingly
directionless Republican Party vehicle), this progression spelt
protracted death, for reasons that continue to elude it. The Idea of
America was now inextricable from a vehement renunciation of the past,
and even of the present, insofar as the past still shaped it. Only an
‘ever more perfect union’ could conform to it. At the most superficial
level, the broad partisan implications of the new order were
unmistakable in a country that was becoming ever more democratic, and
ever less republican, with effective sovereignty nationally concentrated
in the executive, and the moral urgency of activist government installed
as a principle of faith. For what had already become the ‘Old Right’
there was no way out, or back, because the path backwards crossed the
event horizon of the civil rights movement, into tracts of political
impossibility whose ultimate meaning was slavery.
The left thrives on dialectics, the right perishes through them. Insofar
as there is a pure logic of politics, it is that. One immediate
consequence (repeatedly emphasized by Mencius Moldbug) is that
progressivism has no enemies to the left. It recognizes only idealists,
whose time has not yet come. Factional conflicts on the left are
politically dynamic, celebrated for their motive potential.
Conservatism, in contrast, is caught between a rock and a hard place:
bludgeoned from the left by the juggernaut of post-constitutional
statism, and agitated from ‘the right’ by inchoate tendencies which are
both unassimilable (to the mainstream) and often mutually incompatible,
ranging from extreme (Austro-libertarian) varieties of
laissez-faire capitalist advocacy to strains of obstinate,
theologically-grounded social traditionalism, ultra-nationalism, or
white identity politics.
‘The right’ has no unity, actual or prospective, and thus has no
definition symmetrical to that of the left. It is for this reason that
political dialectics (a tautology) ratchets only in one direction,
predictably, towards state expansion and an increasingly coercive
substantial-egalitarian ideal. The right moves to the center, and the
center moves to the left.
Regardless of mainstream conservative fantasies, liberal-progressive
mastery of American providence has become uncontestable, dominated by a
racial dialectic that absorbs unlimited contradiction, whilst
positioning the Afro-American underclass as the incarnate critique of
the existing social order, the criterion of emancipation, and the sole
path to collective salvation. No alternative structure of historical
intelligibility is politically tolerable, or even – strictly speaking –
imaginable, since resistance to the narrative is un-American,
anti-social, and (of course) racist, serving only to confirm the
existence of systematic racial oppression through the symbolic violence
manifested in its negation. To argue against it is already to prove it
correct, by concretely demonstrating the same benighted forces of social
retardation that are being verbally denied. By resisting the demand for
orchestrated social re-education, knuckle-dragging ‘bitter clingers’
only show how much there still is to do.
At its most abstract and all-encompassing, the liberal-progressive
racial dialectic abolishes its outside, along with any possibility of
principled consistency. It asserts — at one and the same time — that
race does not exist, and that its socially-constructed pseudo-existence
is an instrument of inter-racial violence. Racial recognition is both
mandatory, and forbidden. Racial identities are meticulously catalogued
for purposes of social remedy, hate crime detection, and disparate
impact studies, targeting groups for ‘positive discrimination’,
‘affirmative action’, or ‘diversity promotion’ (to list these terms in
their rough order of historical substitution), even as they are
denounced as meaningless (by the United Nations, no less), and dismissed
as malicious stereotypes, corresponding to nothing real. Extreme racial
sensitivity and absolute racial desensitization are demanded
simultaneously. Race is everything and nothing. There is no way out.
Conservatism is dialectically incompetent by definition, and so abjectly
clueless that it imagines itself being able to exploit these
contradictions, or – in its deluded
formulation
– liberal cognitive dissonance. The conservatives who
triumphantly point out such inconsistencies seem never to have skimmed
the output of a contemporary humanities program, in which thick rafts of
internally conflicted victimage are lovingly woven out of incompatible
grievances, in order to exult in the radical progressive promise of
their discordant lamentations. Inconsistency is fuel for the Cathedral,
demanding activist argumentation, and ever heightened realizations of
unity.
Integrative public debate always moves things to the left —
that might not seem an especially difficult point to grasp, but to
understand it is to expose the fundamental futility of mainstream
conservatism, and that is in almost nobody’s interest, so it will not be
understood.
Conservatism is incapable of working dialectics, or simultaneous
contradiction, but that does not prevent it from serving progress (on
the contrary). Rather than celebrating the power of inconsistency, it
stumbles through contradictions, decompressed, in succession, in the
manner of a fossil exhibition, and a foil. After “standing athwart
history, yelling ‘Stop!’” during the Civil Rights Era, and thus
banishing itself eternally to racial damnation, the conservative (and
Republican) mainstream reversed course, seizing upon Martin Luther King
Jr. as an integral part of its canon, and seeking to harmonize itself
with
“a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out
the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of
former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to
sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state
sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of
oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and
justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but
by the content of their character.
Captivated by King’s appeal to constitutional and biblical
traditionalism, by his rejection of political violence, and by his
uninhibited paeans to freedom, American conservatism gradually came to
identify with his dream of racial reconciliation and race blindness, and
to accept it as the true, providential meaning of its own most sacred
documents. At least, this became the mainstream, public, conservative
orthodoxy, even though it was consolidated far too late to neutralize
suspicions of insincerity, failed almost entirely to convince the black
demographic itself, and would remain open to escalating derision from
the left for its empty formalism.
So compelling was King’s restatement of the American Creed that,
retrospectively, its triumph over the political mainstream seems simply
inevitable. The further American conservatism departed from the Masonic
rationalism of the founders, in the direction of biblical religiosity,
the more indistinguishable its faith became from a Black American
experience, mythically articulated through Exodus, in which the
basic framework of history was an escape from bondage, borne towards a
future in which “all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews
and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and
sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at
last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
The genius of King’s message lay in its extraordinary power of
integration. The flight of the Hebrews from Egypt, the American War of
Independence, the abolition of chattel slavery in the wake of the
American Civil War, and the aspirations of the civil rights era were
mythically compressed into a single archetypal episode, perfectly
consonant with the American Creed, and driven forwards not only by
irresistible moral force, but even by divine decree. The measure of this
integrative genius, however, is the complexity it masters. A century
after the “joyous daybreak” of emancipation from slavery, King declares,
“the Negro still is not free.”
One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly
crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of
discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely
island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material
prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished
in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his
own land.
The story of Exodus is exit, the War of Independence is exit,
and the emancipation from slavery is exit, especially when this is
exemplified by the Underground Railroad and the model of
self-liberation, escape, or flight. To be ‘manacled’ by segregation,
‘chained’ by discrimination, trapped on a ‘lonely island of poverty’, or
‘exiled’ in one’s ‘own land’, in contrast, has no relation to
exit whatsoever, beyond that which spell-binding metaphor can
achieve. There is no exit into social integration and
acceptance, equitably distributed prosperity, public participation, or
assimilation, but only an aspiration, or a dream, hostage to fact and
fortune. As the left and the reactionary right were equally quick to
notice, insofar as this dream ventures significantly beyond a right to
formal equality and into the realm of substantial political remedy, it
is one that the right has no right to.
In the immediate wake of the John Derbyshire affair, Jessica Valenti at
The Nation blog
makes
the point clearly:
… this isn’t just about who has written what — it’s about the
intensely racist policies that are par for the conservative course.
Some people would like to believe that racism is just the explicit,
said-out-loud discrimination and hatred that is easily identifiable.
It’s not — it’s also pushing xenophobic policies and supporting
systemic inequality. After all, what’s more impactful — a singular
racist like Derbyshire or Arizona’s immigration law? A column or
voter suppression? Getting rid of one racist from one publication
doesn’t change the fact that the conservative agenda is one that
disproportionately punishes and discriminates against people of
color. So, I’m sorry, folks — you don’t get to support structural
inequality and then give yourself a pat on the back for not being
overtly racist.
The ‘conservative agenda’ cannot ever be dreamy (hopeful and
inconsistent) enough to escape accusations of racism – that’s intrinsic
to the way the racial dialectic works. Policies broadly compatible with
capitalistic development, oriented to the rewarding of low
time-preference, and thus punishing impulsivity, will reliably have a
disparate impact upon the least economically functional social groups.
Of course, the dialectic demands that the racial aspect of this
disparate impact can and must be strongly emphasized (for the purpose of
condemning incentives to human capital formation as racist), and at the
same time forcefully denied (in order to denounce
exactly the same observation as racist stereotyping). Anyone
who expects conservatives to navigate this double-bind with political
agility and grace must somehow have missed the late 20th century. For
instance, the doomed loser idiots conservatives at the
Washington Examiner,
noticing
with alarm that:
House Democrats received training this week on how to address the
issue of race to defend government programs … The prepared content
of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff
indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral
free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or
unconscious.
There are no alternative versions of an ever more perfect union, because
union is the alternative to alternatives. Searching for where the
alternatives might once have been found, where liberty still meant
exit, and where dialectics were dissolved in space, leads into
a clown-house of horrors, fabricated as the shadow, or significant
other, of the Cathedral. Since the right never had a unity of its own,
it was given one. Call it the Cracker Factory.
When James C. Bennett, in The Anglosphere Challenge, sought to
identify the principal cultural characteristics of the English-speaking
world, the resulting list was generally familiar. It included, besides
the language itself, common law traditions, individualism, comparatively
high-levels of economic and technological openness, and distinctively
emphatic reservations about centralized political power. Perhaps the
most striking feature, however, was a marked cultural tendency to settle
disagreements in space, rather than time, opting for territorial schism,
separatism, independence, and flight, in place of revolutionary
transformation within an integrated territory. When Anglophones
disagree, they have often sought to dissociate in space. Instead of an
integral resolution (regime change), they pursue a plural irresolution
(through regime division), proliferating polities, localizing power, and
diversifying systems of government. Even in its present, highly
attenuated form, this anti-dialectical, de-synthesizing predisposition
to social disaggregation finds expression in a stubborn, sussurous
hostility to globalist political projects, and in a vestigial attraction
to federalism (in its fissional sense).
Splitting, or fleeing, is all exit, and (non-recuperable)
anti-dialectics. It is the basic well-spring of liberty within the
Anglophone tradition. If the function of a Cracker Factory is to block
off all the exits, there’s only one place to build it – right here.
Like Hell, or Auschwitz, the Cracker Factory has a simple slogan
inscribed upon its gate: Escape is racist. That is why the
expression ‘white flight’ – which says exactly the same thing – has
never been denounced for its political incorrectness, despite the fact
that it draws upon an ethnic statistical generalization of the kind that
would, in any other case, provoke paroxysms of outrage. ‘White flight’
is no more ‘white’ than low time-preference is, but this broad-brush
insensitivity is deemed acceptable, because it structurally supports the
Cracker Factory, and the indispensable confusion of ancient (or
negative) liberty with original (racial) sin.
You absolutely, definitely, mustn’t go
there
… so, of course, we will … [next]
May 17, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4d)
Odd Marriages
The origins of the word ‘cracker’ as a term of ethnic derision are
distant and obscure. It seems to have already circulated, as a slur
targeting poor southern whites of predominantly Celtic ancestry, in the
mid-18th century, derived perhaps from ‘corn-cracker’ or the Scots-Irish
‘crack’ (banter). The rich semantic complexion of the term, inextricable
from the identification of elaborate racial, cultural, and class
characteristics, is comparable to that of its unmentionable dusky cousin
– “the ‘N-‘word” – and
draws from the same well of generally recognized but forbidden
truths. In particular, and emphatically, it testifies to the
illicit truism that people are more excited and animated by
their differences than by their commonalities, ‘clinging bitterly’ – or
at least tenaciously – to their non-uniformity, and obstinately
resisting the universal categories of enlightened population management.
Crackers are grit in the clockwork of progress.
The most delectable features of the slur, however, are entirely
fortuitous (or Qabbalistic). ‘Crackers’ break codes, safes, organic
chemicals – sealed or bonded systems of all kinds – with eventual
geopolitical implication. They anticipate a crack-up, schism or
secession, confirming their association with the anathematized
disintegrative undercurrent of Anglophone history. No surprise, then –
despite the linguistic jumps and glitching – that the figure of the
recalcitrant cracker evokes a still-unpacified South, insubordinate to
the manifest destiny of Union. This returns it, by short-circuit, to the
most problematic depths of its meaning.
Contradictions demand resolution, but cracks can
continue to widen, deepen, and spread. According to the cracker ethos,
when things can fall apart – it’s OK. There’s no need to reach
agreement, when it’s possible to split. This cussedness,
pursued to its limit, tends to a hill-billy stereotype set in a shack or
rusting trailer at the end of an Appalachian mountain path, where all
economic transactions are conducted in cash (or moonshine), interactions
with government agents are conducted across the barrel of a loaded
shotgun, and timeless anti-political wisdom is summed in the
don’t-tread-on-me reflex: “Get off my porch.” Naturally, this disdain
for integrative debate (dialectics) is coded within the mainstream of
Anglocentric global history – which is to say, Yankee evangelical
Puritanism – as a deficiency not only of cultural sophistication, but
also of basic intelligence, and even the most scrupulous adherent of
social constructivist righteousness immediately reverts to
hard-hereditarian psychometrics when confronted by cracker
obstreperousness. To those for whom a broad trend of socio-political
progress seems like a simple, incontestable fact, the refusal to
recognize anything of the kind is perceived as clear evidence of
retardation.
Since stereotypes generally have high statistical truth-value, it’s more
than possible that crackers are clustered heavily on the left of the
white IQ bell-curve, concentrated there by generations of dysgenic
pressure. If, as Charles Murray argues, the efficiency of meritocratic
selection within American society has steadily risen and conspired with
assortative mating to transform class differences into genetic castes,
it would be passing strange if the cracker stratum were to be
characterized by conspicuous cognitive elevation. Yet some awkwardly
intriguing questions intervene at this point, as long as one diligently
pursues the stereotype. Assortative mating? How can that work, when
crackers marry their cousins? Oh yes, there’s that. Drawing on
population groups beyond the north-western
Hajnal
Line, traditional cracker kinship patterns are notably atypical of the
exogamous Anglo (WASP) norm.
The tireless ‘hbdchick’ is the crucial resource
on
this topic. Over the course of a truly
monumental series of blog
posts, she employs
Hamiltonian
conceptual tools to investigate the borderland where nature and culture
intersect, comprising kinship structures, the differentiations they
require in the calculus of inclusive fitness, and the distinctive ethnic
profiles in the evolutionary psychology of altruism that result. In
particular, she directs attention to the abnormality of (North-West)
European history, where obligatory exogamy – through rigorous
proscription of cousin marriage – has prevailed for 1,600 years. This
distinctive orientation towards outbreeding, she suggests, plausibly
accounts for a variety of bio-cultural peculiarities, the most
historically significant of which is a unique pre-eminence of reciprocal
(over familial) altruism, as indicated by emphatic individualism,
nuclear families, an affinity with ‘corporate’ (kinship-free)
institutions, highly-developed contractual relationships among
strangers, relatively low levels of nepotism / corruption, and robust
forms of social cohesion independent of tribal bonds.
Inbreeding, in contrast, creates a selective environment favoring tribal
collectivism, extended systems of family loyalty and honor, distrust of
non-relatives and impersonal institutions, and – in general – those
‘clannish’ traits which mesh uncomfortably with the leading values of
(Eurocentric) modernity, and are thus denounced for their primitive
‘xenophobia’ and ‘corruption’. Clannish values, of course, are bred in
clans, such as those populating Britain’s Celtic fringe and borderlands,
where cousin marriage persisted, along with its associated
socio-economic and cultural forms, especially herding (rather than
farming), and a disposition towards extreme, vendetta-style
violence.
This analysis introduces the central paradox of ‘white identity’, since
the specifically European ethnic traits that have structured the moral
order of modernity, slanting it away from tribalism and towards
reciprocal altruism, are inseparable from a unique heritage of
outbreeding that is intrinsically corrosive of ethnocentric solidarity.
In other words: it is almost exactly weak ethnic groupishness that makes
a group ethnically modernistic, competent at ‘corporate’ (non-familial)
institution building, and thus objectively privileged / advantaged
within the dynamic of modernity.
This paradox is most fully expressed in the radical forms of European
ethnocentric revivalism exemplified by paleo- and neo-Nazism,
confounding its proponents and antagonists alike. When exceptionally
advanced ‘race-treachery’ is your quintessential racial feature, the
opportunity for viable ethno-supremacist politics disappears into a
logical abyss – even if occasions for large-scale trouble-making no
doubt remain. Admittedly, a Nazi, by definition, is willing (and eager)
to sacrifice modernity upon the altar of racial purity, but this is
either not to understand, or to tragically affirm, the inevitable
consequence – which is to be out-modernized (and thus defeated).
Identity politics is for losers, inherently and unalterably, due to an
essentially parasitical character that only works from the left. Because
inbreeding systematically contra-indicates for modern power, racial
Übermenschen make no real sense.
In any case, however endlessly fascinating Nazis may be, they are not
any kind of reliable key to the history or direction of
cracker
culture, beyond setting a logical limit to the programmatic construction and
usage of white identity politics. Tattooing swastikas on their foreheads
does nothing to change that. (Hatfields vs McCoys
is more Pushtun than Teuton.)
The conjunction taking place in the Cracker Factory is quite different,
and far more perplexing, entangling the urbane, cosmopolitan advocates
of hyper-contractarian marketization with romantic traditionalists,
ethno-particularists, and nostalgics of the ‘Lost Cause’. It is first
necessary to understand this entanglement in its full, mind-melting
weirdness, before exploring its lessons. For that, some semi-random
stripped-down data-points might be helpful:
* The
Mises Institute
was founded in Auburn, Alabama.
* Ron Paul newsletters from the 1980s contain
remarks
of a decidedly Derbyshirean hue.
* Derbyshire
hearts
Ron Paul.
* Murray Rothbard has
written
in defense of HBD.
* lewrockwell.com contributors include
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
and
Thomas Woods
* Tom Palmer
doesn’t
heart Lew Rockwell or Hans-Hermann Hoppe because “Together They Have
Opened the Gates of Hell and Welcomed the Most Extreme Right-Wing
Racists, Nationalists, and Assorted Cranks”
* Libertarians / constitutionalists account for 20% of the SPLC ‘Radical
Right’ watch
list
(Chuck Baldwin, Michael Boldin, Tom DeWeese, Alex Jones, Cliff Kincaid,
and Elmer Stewart Rhodes)
… perhaps that’s enough to be going on with (although there’s plenty
more within easy reach). These points have been selected, questionably,
crudely, and prejudicially, to lend impressionistic support to a single
basic thesis:
fundamental socio-historical forces are crackerizing
libertarianism.
If the tentative research conclusions drawn by hbdchick are accepted as
a frame, the oddity of this marriage between libertarian and
neo-confederate themes is immediately apparent. When positioned on a
bio-cultural axis, defined by degrees of outbreeding, the absence of
overlap – or even proximity – is dramatically exposed. One pole is
occupied by a radically individualistic doctrine, focused
near-exclusively upon mutable networks of voluntary interchange of an
economic type (and notoriously insensitive to the very existence of
non-negotiable social bonds). Close to the other pole lies a rich
culture of local attachment, extended family, honor, contempt for
commercial values, and distrust of strangers. The distilled rationality
of fluid capitalism is juxtaposed to traditional hierarchy and
non-alienable value. The absolute prioritization of exit is
jumbled amongst folkways from which no exit is even imaginable.
Stapling the two together, however, is a simple, ever more irresistible
conclusion: liberty has no future in the Anglophone world outside the
prospect of secession. The coming crack-up is the only way out.
June 15, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4e)
Cross-coded history
Democracy is the opposite of freedom, almost inherent to the
democratic process is that it tends towards less liberty instead of
more, and democracy is not something to be fixed. Democracy is
inherently broken, just like socialism. The only way to fix it is to
break it up. —
Frank Karsten
Historian (mainly of science) Doug Fosnow called for the USA’s
“red” counties to secede from the “blue” ones, forming a new
federation. This was greeted with much skepticism by the audience,
who noted that the “red” federation would get practically no
seacoast. Did Doug really think such a secession was likely to
happen? No, he admitted cheerfully, but anything would be better
than the race war he does think is likely to happen, and it is
intellectuals’ duty to come up with less horrific possibilities.–
John Derbyshire
Thus, rather than by means of a top-down reform, under the current
conditions, one’s strategy must be one of a bottom-up revolution. At
first, the realization of this insight would seem to make the task
of a liberal-libertarian social revolution impossible, for does this
not imply that one would have to persuade a majority of the public
to vote for the abolition of democracy and an end to all taxes and
legislation? And is this not sheer fantasy, given that the masses
are always dull and indolent, and even more so given that democracy,
as explained above, promotes moral and intellectual degeneration?
How in the world can anyone expect that a majority of an
increasingly degenerate people accustomed to the “right” to vote
should ever voluntarily renounce the opportunity of looting other
people’s property? Put this way, one must admit that the prospect of
a social revolution must indeed be regarded as virtually nil.
Rather, it is only on second thought, upon regarding secession as an
integral part of any bottom-up strategy, that the task of a
liberal-libertarian revolution appears less than impossible, even if
it still remains a daunting one.
–
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Conceived generically, modernity is a social condition defined by an
integral trend, summarized as sustained economic growth rates that
exceed population increases, and thus mark an escape from normal
history, caged within the Malthusian trap. When, in the interest of
dispassionate appraisal, analysis is restricted to the terms of this
basic quantitative pattern, it supports sub-division into the (growth)
positive and negative components of the trend: techno-industrial
(scientific and commercial) contributions to accelerating development on
the one hand, and socio-political counter-tendencies towards the capture
of economic product by democratically empowered rent-seeking special
interests on the other (demosclerosis). What classical liberalism gives (industrial revolution) mature
liberalism takes away (via the cancerous entitlement state). In abstract
geometry, it describes an S-curve of self-limiting runaway. As a drama
of liberation, it is a broken promise.
Conceived particularly, as a singularity, or real thing,
modernity has ethno-geographical characteristics that complicate and
qualify its mathematical purity. It came from somewhere, imposed itself
more widely, and brought the world’s various peoples into an
extraordinary range of novel relations. These relations were
characteristically ‘modern’ if they involved an overflowing of previous
Malthusian limits, enabling capital accumulation, and initiating new
demographic trends, but they conjoined concrete groups rather than
abstract economic functions. At least in appearance, therefore,
modernity was something done by people of a certain kind with, and not
uncommonly to (or even against), other people, who were conspicuously
unlike them. By the time it was faltering on the fading slope of the
S-curve, in the early 20th century, resistance to its generic features
(‘capitalistic alienation’) had become almost entirely indistinguishable
from opposition to its particularity (‘European imperialism’ and ‘white
supremacy’). As an inevitable consequence, the modernistic
self-consciousness of the system’s ethno-geographical core slid
towards
racial
panic, in a
process
that was only arrested by the rise and immolation of the
Third Reich.
Given modernity’s inherent trend to degeneration or self-cancellation,
three broad prospects open. These are not strictly exclusive, and are
therefore not true alternatives, but for schematic purposes it is
helpful to present them as such.
(1) Modernity 2.0. Global modernization is re-invigorated from a new
ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its
Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting long range trends of
an equally mortuary character. This is by far the most encouraging and
plausible scenario (from a pro-modernist perspective), and if China
remains even approximately on its current track it will be assuredly
realized. (India, sadly, seems to be too far gone in its native version
of demosclerosis to seriously compete.)
(2) Postmodernity. Amounting essentially to a new dark age, in which
Malthusian limits brutally re-impose themselves, this scenario assumes
that Modernity 1.0 has so radically globalized its own morbidity that
the entire future of the world collapses around it. If the Cathedral
‘wins’ this is what we have coming.
(3) Western Renaissance. To be reborn it is first necessary to die, so
the harder the ‘hard reboot’ the better. Comprehensive crisis and
disintegration offers the best odds (most realistically as a sub-theme
of option #1).
Because competition is good, a pinch of Western Renaissance would spice
things up, even if – as is overwhelmingly probable — Modernity 2.0 is
the world’s principal highway to the future. That depends upon the West
stopping and reversing pretty much everything it has been doing for over
a century, excepting only scientific, technological, and business
innovation. It is advisable to maintain rhetorical discipline within a
strictly hypothetical mode, because the possibility of any of these
things is deeply colored by incredibility:
(1) Replacement of representational democracy by constitutional
republicanism (or still more
extreme
anti-political governmental mechanisms).
(2) Massive downsizing of government and its rigorous confinement to
core functions (at
most).
(3) Restoration of hard money (precious metal coins and bullion deposit
notes) and abolition of central banking.
(4) Dismantling of state monetary and fiscal discretion, thus abolishing
practical macroeconomics and liberating the autonomous (or
‘catallactic’) economy. (This point is redundant, since it follows
rigorously from 2 & 3 above, but it’s the real prize, so worth
emphasizing.)
There’s more – which is to say, less politics – but it’s already
absolutely clear that none of this is going to happen short of an
existential civilizational cataclysm. Asking politicians to limit their
own powers is a non-starter, but nothing less heads even remotely in the
right direction. This, however, isn’t even the widest or deepest
problem.
Democracy might begin as a defensible procedural mechanism for limiting
government power, but it quickly and inexorably develops into something
quite different: a culture of systematic thievery. As soon as
politicians have learnt to buy political support from the ‘public
purse’, and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the
democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s)
‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by
common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft. Worse
still, since people are, on average, not very bright, the scale of
depredation available to the political establishment far exceeds even
the demented sacking that is open to public scrutiny. Looting the
future, through currency debauchment, debt accumulation, growth
destruction, and techno-industrial retardation is especially easy to
conceal, and thus reliably popular. Democracy is essentially tragic
because it provides the populace with a weapon to destroy itself, one
that is always eagerly seized, and used. Nobody ever says ‘no’ to free
stuff. Scarcely anybody even sees that there is no free stuff. Utter
cultural ruination is the necessary conclusion.
Within the final phase of Modernity 1.0, American history becomes the
master narrative of the world. It is there that the great Abrahamic
cultural conveyor culminates in the secularized neo-puritanism of the
Cathedral, as it establishes the New Jerusalem in Washington DC. The
apparatus of Messianic-revolutionary purpose is consolidated in the
evangelical state, which is authorized by any means necessary to install
a new world order of universal fraternity, in the name of equality,
human rights, social justice, and – above all – democracy. The
absolute moral confidence of the Cathedral underwrites the enthusiastic
pursuit of unrestrained centralized power, optimally unlimited in its
intensive penetration and its extensive scope.
With an irony altogether hidden from the witch-burners’ spawn
themselves, the ascent of this squinting cohort of grim moral fanatics
to previously unscaled heights of global power coincides with the
descent of mass-democracy to previously unimagined depths of gluttonous
corruption. Every five years America steals itself from itself again,
and fences itself back in exchange for political support.
This democracy thing is easy – you just vote for the guy who promises
you the most stuff. An idiot could do it.
Actually, it likes idiots, treats them with apparent kindness, and does
everything it can to manufacture more of them.
Democracy’s relentless trend to degeneration presents an implicit case
for reaction. Since every major threshold of socio-political ‘progress’
has ratcheted Western civilization towards comprehensive ruin, a
retracing of its steps suggests a reversion from the society of pillage
to an older order of self-reliance, honest industry and exchange,
pre-propagandistic learning, and civic self-organization. The
attractions of this reactionary vision are evidenced by the vogue for
18th century attire, symbols, and constitutional documents among the
substantial (Tea Party) minority who clearly see the disastrous course
of American political history.
Has the ‘race’ alarm sounded in your head yet? It would be amazing if it
hadn’t. Stagger back in imagination before 2008, and the fraught whisper
of conscience is already questioning your prejudices against Kenyan
revolutionaries and black Marxist professors. Remain in reverse until
the Great Society / Civil Rights era and the warnings reach hysterical
pitch. It’s perfectly obvious by this point that American political
history has progressed along twin, interlocking tracks, corresponding to
the capacity and the legitimation of the state. To
cast doubt upon its scale and scope is to simultaneously dispute the
sanctity of its purpose, and the moral-spiritual necessity that it
command whatever resources, and impose whatever legal restraints, may be
required to effectively fulfill it. More specifically, to recoil from
the magnitude of Leviathan is to demonstrate insensitivity to the
immensity – indeed, near infinity – of inherited racial guilt, and the
sole surviving categorical imperative of senescent modernity –
government needs to do more. The possibility, indeed near
certainty, that the pathological consequences of chronic government
activism have long ago supplanted the problems they originally targeted,
is a contention so utterly maladapted to the epoch of democratic
religion that its practical insignificance is assured.
Even on the left, it would be extraordinary to find many who genuinely
believe, after sustained reflection, that the primary driver of
government expansion and centralization has been the burning desire
to do good (not that intentions matter). Yet, as the twin
tracks cross, such is the electric jolt of moral drama, leaping the gap
from racial Golgotha to intrusive Leviathan, that skepticism is
suspended, and the great progressive myth installed.
The alternative to more government, doing ever more, was to stand
there, negligently, whilst they lynched another Negro. This proposition contains the entire essential
content of American
progressive education.
The twin historical tracks of state capability and purpose can be
conceived as a translation protocol, enabling any recommended restraint
upon government power to be ‘decoded’ as malign obstruction of racial
justice. This system of substitutions functions so smoothly that it
provides an entire vocabulary of (bipartisan) ‘code-words’ or
‘dog-whistles’ – ‘welfare’, ‘freedom of association’, ‘states rights’ –
ensuring that any intelligible utterance on the Principal (left-right)
Political Dimension occupies a double registry, semi-saturated by racial
evocations. Reactionary regression smells of strange fruit.
… and that is before backing out of the calamitous 20th century. It was
not the Civil Rights Era, but the ‘American Civil War’ (in the terms of
the victors) or ‘War between the States’ (in those of the vanquished)
that first indissolubly cross-coded the practical question of Leviathan
with (black/white) racial dialectics, laying down the central junction
yard of subsequent political antagonism and rhetoric. The indispensable
primary step in comprehending this fatality snakes along an awkward
diagonal between mainstream statist and revisionist accounts, because
the conflagration that consumed the American nation in the early 1860s
was wholly but non-exclusively about emancipation from slavery
and about
states rights,
with
neither ‘cause’ reducible to the other, or sufficient to
suppress the war’s enduring ambiguities. Whilst there are any number of
‘liberals’ happy to celebrate the consolidation of centralized
government power in the triumphant Union, and, symmetrically, a (far
smaller) number of neo-confederate apologists for the institution of
chattel slavery in the southern states, neither of these unconflicted
stances capture the dynamic cultural legacy of a
war across the codes.
The war is a knot. By practically dissociating liberty into
emancipation and independence, then hurling each
against the other in a half-decade of carnage, blue against gray, it was
settled that freedom would be broken on the battlefield, whatever the
outcome of the conflict. Union victory determined that the emancipatory
sense of liberty would prevail, not only in America, but throughout the
world, and the eventual reign of the Cathedral was assured.
Nevertheless, the crushing of American’s second war of secession made a
mockery of the first. If the institution of slavery de-legitimated a war
of independence, what survived of 1776? The moral coherence of the Union
cause required that the founders were reconceived as politically
illegitimate white patriarchal slave-owners, and American history
combusted in progressive education and the culture wars.
If independence is the ideology of slave-holders, emancipation requires
the programmatic destruction of independence. Within a cross-coded
history, the realization of freedom is indistinguishable from its
abolition.
July 3, 2012
The Dark Enlightenment (Part 4f(inal))
Approaching the Bionic Horizon
It’s time to bring this long digression to a conclusion, by reaching out
impatiently towards the end. The basic theme has been mind control, or
thought-suppression, as demonstrated by the Media-Academic complex that
dominates contemporary Western societies, and which Mencius Moldbug
names the Cathedral. When things are squashed they rarely disappear.
Instead, they are displaced, fleeing into sheltering shadows, and
sometimes turning into monsters. Today, as the suppressive orthodoxy of
the Cathedral comes unstrung, in various ways, and numerous senses, a
time of monsters is approaching.
The central dogma of the Cathedral
has
been
formalized as the Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) or ‘blank
slate theory’. It is the belief, completed in its essentials by the
anthropology of
Franz Boas, that
every legitimate question about mankind is restricted to the
sphere of culture. Nature permits that ‘man’ is, but never
determines what man is. Questions directed towards natural
characteristics and variations between humans are themselves properly
understood as cultural peculiarities, or even pathologies. Failures of
‘nurture’ are the only thing we are allowed to see.
Because the Cathedral has a consistent ideological orientation, and
sifts its enemies accordingly, comparatively detached scientific
appraisal of the SSSM easily veers into raw antagonism. As Simon
Blackburn
remarks
(in a thoughtful review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate),
“The dichotomy between nature and nurture rapidly acquires political and
emotional implications. To put it crudely, the right likes genes and the
left likes culture …”
At the limit of reciprocal loathing, hereditarian determinism confronts
social constructivism, with each committed to a radically pared-back
model of causality. Either nature expresses itself as culture,
or culture expresses itself in its images (‘constructions’) of
nature. Both of these positions are trapped at opposite sides of an
incomplete circuit, structurally blinded to
the culture of practical naturalism, which is to say: the
techno-scientific / industrial manipulation of the world.
Acquiring knowledge and using tools is a single dynamic circuit,
producing techno-science as an integral system, without real
divisibility into theoretical and practical aspects. Science develops in
loops, through experimental technique and the production of
ever more sophisticated instrumentation, whilst embedded within a
broader industrial process. Its advance is the improvement of a machine.
This intrinsically technological character of (modern) science
demonstrates the efficiency of culture as a complex natural
force. It neither expresses a pre-existing natural circumstance, nor
does it merely construct social representations. Instead, nature and
culture compose a dynamic circuit, at the edge of nature, where fate is
decided.
According to the self-reinforcing presupposition of modernization, to be
understood is to be modifiable. It is to be expected, therefore, that
biology and medicine co-evolve. The same historical dynamic that
comprehensively subverts the SSSM through inundating waves of scientific
discovery simultaneously volatilizes human biological identity through
biotechnology. There is no essential difference between learning what we
really are and re-defining ourselves as technological
contingencies, or technoplastic beings, susceptible to precise,
scientifically-informed transformations. ‘Humanity’ becomes intelligible
as it is subsumed into the technosphere, where information processing of
the genome – for instance — brings reading and editing into perfect
coincidence.
To describe this circuit, as it consumes the human species, is to define
our bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture
fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its
technology. This is neither hereditarian determinism, nor social
constructivism, but it is what both would have referred to, had they
indicated anything real. It is a syndrome vividly anticipated by Octavia
Butler, whose
Xenogenesis
trilogy is devoted to the examination of a population beyond the bionic
horizon. Her Oankali ‘gene traders’ have no identity separable from the
biotechnological program that they perpetually implement upon
themselves, as they commercially acquire, industrially produce, and
sexually reproduce their population within a single, integral process.
Between what the Oankali are, and the way they live, or behave, there is
no firm difference. Because they make themselves, their nature is their
culture and (of course) reciprocally. What they are is exactly
what they do.
Religious traditionalists of the Western Orthosphere are right to
identify the looming bionic horizon with a (negative) theological event.
Techno-scientific auto-production specifically supplants the fixed and
sacralized essence of man as a created being, amidst the greatest
upheaval in the natural order since the emergence of eukaryotic life,
half a billion years ago. It is not merely an evolutionary event, but
the threshold of a new evolutionary phase. John H. Campbell
heralds the emergence of Homo autocatalyticus, whilst
arguing: “In point of fact, it is hard to
imagine how a system of inheritance
could be more ideal for engineering than ours is.”
John H. Campbell? – a prophet of monstrosity, and the perfect excuse for
a monster quote:
“Biologists suspect that new forms evolve rapidly from very tiny
outgroups of individuals (perhaps even a single fertilized female,
Mayr, 1942) at the fringe of an existing species. There the stress
of an all but uninhabitable environment, forced inbreeding among
isolated family members, “introgression” of foreign genes from
neighboring species, lack of other members of the species to compete
against or whatever, promotes a major reorganization of the genomic
program, possibly from modest change in gene structure. Nearly all
of these transmogrified fragments of species die out, but an
occasional one is fortunate enough to fit a new viable niche. It
prospers and expands into a new species. Its conversion into a
statistically constrained gene pool then stabilizes the species from
further evolutionary change. Established species are far more
notable for their stasis than change. Even throwing off a new
daughter species does not seem to change an existing species. No one
denies that species can gradually transform and do so to various
extents, but this so-called “anagenesis” is relatively unimportant
compared to geologically-sudden major saltation in the generation of
novelty.
Three implications are important.
1. Most evolutionary change is associated with the origin of new
species.
2. Several modes of evolution may operate simultaneously. In this
case the most effective dominates the process.
3. Tiny minorities of individuals do most of the evolving instead
of the species as a whole.
A second important characteristic of evolution is self-reference
(Campbell, 1982). The Cartesian cartoon of an autonomous external
“environment” dictating the form of a species like a cookie cutter
cutting stencils from sheets of dough is dead, dead wrong. The
species molds its environment as profoundly as the environment
“evolves” the species. In particular, the organisms cause the
limiting conditions of the environment over which they compete.
Therefore the genes play two roles in evolution. They are the
targets of natural selection and they also ultimately induce and
determine the selection pressures that act upon them. This circular
causality overwhelms the mechanical character of evolution.
Evolution is dominated by feedback of the evolved activities of
organisms on their evolution.
The third seminal realization is that evolution extends past the
change in organisms as products of evolution to change in the
process itself. Evolution evolves (Jantsch, 1976; Balsh, 1989;
Dawkins, 1989; Campbell, 1993). Evolutionists know this fact but
have never accorded the fact the importance that it deserves because
it is incommensurate with Darwinism. Darwinists, and especially
modern neodarwinists, equate evolution to the operation of a simple
logical principle, one that is prior to biology: Evolution is merely
the Darwinian principle of natural selection in action, and this is
what the science of evolution is about. Since principles cannot
change with time or circumstances, evolution must be fundamentally
static.
Of course, biological evolution is not like this at all. It is an
actual complex process, not a principle. The way that it takes place
can, and indisputably does, change with time. This is of utmost
importance because the process of evolution advances as it proceeds
(Campbell, 1986). Preliving matter in the earth’s primordial soup
was able to evolve only by subdarwinian “chemical” mechanisms. Once
these puny processes created gene molecules with information for
their self-replication then evolution was able to engage natural
selection. Evolution then wrapped the self-replicating genomes
within self-replicating organisms to control the way that life would
respond to the winds of selection from the environment. Later, by
creating multicellular organisms, evolution gained access to
morphological change as an alternative to slower and less versatile
biochemical evolution. Changes in the instructions in developmental
programs replaced changes in enzyme catalysts. Nervous systems
opened the way for still faster and more potent behavioral, social
and cultural evolution. Finally, these higher modes produced the
prerequisite organization for rational, purposeful evolution, guided
and propelled by goal-directed minds. Each of these steps
represented a new emergent level of evolutionary capability.
Thus, there are two distinct, but interwoven, evolutionary
processes. I call them “adaptive evolution” and “generative
evolution.” The former is familiar Darwinian modification of
organisms to enhance their survival and reproductive success.
Generative evolution is entirely different. It is the change in a
process instead of structure. Moreover, that process is ontological.
Evolution literally means “to unfold” and what is unfolding is the
capacity to evolve. Higher animals have become increasingly adept at
evolving. In contrast, they are not the least bit fitter than their
ancestors or the lowest form of microbe. Every species today has had
exactly the same track record of survival; on average, every higher
organism alive today still will leave only two offspring, as was the
case a hundred million years ago, and modern species are as likely
to go extinct as were those in the past. Species cannot become
fitter and fitter because reproductive success is not a cumulative
parameter.
For racial nationalists, concerned that their grandchildren should look
like them, Campbell is the abyss. Miscegenation doesn’t get close to the
issue. Think face tentacles.
Campbell is also a secessionist, although entirely undistracted by the
concerns of identity politics (racial purity) or traditional cognitive
elitism (eugenics). Approaching the bionic horizon, secessionism takes
on an altogether wilder and more monstrous bearing – towards
speciation. The folks at euvolution
capture
the scenario well:
Reasoning that the majority of humankind will not voluntarily
accept qualitative population-management policies, Campbell points
out that any attempt to raise the IQ of the whole human race would
be tediously slow. He further points out that the general thrust of
early eugenics was not so much species improvement as the prevention
of decline. Campbell’s eugenics, therefore, advocates the
abandonment of Homo sapiens as a ‘relic’ or ‘living fossil’ and the
application of genetic technologies to intrude upon the genome,
probably writing novel genes from scratch using a DNA synthesizer.
Such eugenics would be practiced by elite groups, whose achievements
would so quickly and radically outdistance the usual tempo of
evolution that within ten generation the new groups will have
advanced beyond our current form to the same degree that we
transcend apes.
When seen from the bionic horizon, whatever emerges from the dialectics
of racial terror remains trapped in trivialities. It’s time to move on.
July 20, 2012
Malthusian Horror
The post is pitched like this because it’s Friday night, but it works. A
more dutiful post might have been entitled simply ‘Malthus’ and involved
a lot of work. That’s going to be needed at some point. (Here‘s the 6th edition of An Essay
on
the Principle of Population,
for anyone who wants to get started now.) A more thoroughly technical
approach would have been flagged ‘Neo-Malthusianism’. While sympathizing
with groans about another ‘neo-‘ prefix, in this case it would have been
solidly justified. It’s only through expansion of the Malthusian insight
in accordance with a more general conservation law that its full current
relevance can be appreciated. Classic Malthus still does far more work
than it is credited with, but it contains a principle of far
more penetrating application.
‘Neo-‘ at its most frivolous is merely a mark of fashion. When employed
more seriously, it notes an element of innovation. Its most significant
sense includes not only novelty, but also abstraction. Something is
carried forwards in such a way that its conceptual core is distilled
through extraction from a specific context, achieving a higher
generality, and more exact formality. Malthus partially anticipates this
in a phrase that points beyond any excessively constrictive
concreteness:
The qualification “in some shape or other” might have been drawn from
abstract horror, and “premature death” only loosely binds it. Even so,
this formulation remains too narrow, since it tends to exclude the
dysgenic
outcome, which we have since
learnt
is a dimension of Malthusian expression scarcely less imposing than
resource crisis. A Neo-Malthusian account of the “X” which
in some shape or other makes a grim perversity of all
humanity’s efforts to improve its condition grasps it as a
mathematically conserved, plastic, or abstract destiny, working as
remorselessly through reductions of mortality (Malthusian ‘relaxations’)
as through increases (Malthusian ‘pressures’). Both would count equally
as “checks on population” — each convertible, through a complex
calculus, into the terms of the other. A population dysgenically
deteriorated through ‘enlightened’ Malthusian relaxation learns, once
again, how to starve.
The Dark Enlightenment (essay) was clearly
catalyzed
by the work of Mencius Moldbug, but it was to
have had two Anglo-Thomistic or Doubting Thomas intellectual-historical
pillars (and neither were Thomas Carlyle). The first was Thomas Hobbes,
who was at least touched upon. The second was to have been Thomas
Malthus, but the series was diverted into the foaming current of the
Derbyshire affair and the
outrages of Leftist race politics. The integrity of conception was lost.
Had it not been, it might have been less tempting to read the
333-current as an
Anti-Enlightenment, rather than a Counter-Enlightenment, in the sense of
an eclipsed, alternative to the Rousseauistic calamity that prevailed.
It would certainly attach the Scottish Enlightenment, but only under the
definite condition that it is lashed securely to the harsh realist
scaffolding of the Dark Enlightenment (Hobbes and Malthus),
disillusioned of all idealism. Pretty stories are for little children
(being raised by
liberals).
Malthus subtracts all utopianism from enlightenment. He shows that
history is put together — necessarily — in a butcher’s yard. Through
Malthus, Ricardo discovered the Iron Law of Wages, disconnecting the
ideas of economic advance and humanitarian redemption. Darwin effected a
comparable (and more consequential) revision in biology, also on
Malthusian grounds, dispelling all sentimentality from notions of
evolutionary ‘progression’. It is from Malthus that we know, when
anything seems to move forward, it is through being ground up against a
cutting edge. It is when Marx attempts to put Malthus into history,
rather than history into Malthus, that utopian dementia was resuscitated
within economics. The anti-Malthusianism of Libertarians stigmatizes
them as dreamy fools.
With NRx, the matter is perhaps more unsettled, but the Dark
Enlightenment is unambiguously Mathusian. If you find your eye becoming
dewy, pluck it out.
November 14, 2014